whether they claim to face no competition. We also use administrative data on the timing of when applications were submitted relative to the deadline.

The business plan submission contained more detailed information, including a short baseline survey instrument. This collected additional information about the background of the entrepreneur, including marital status, family composition, languages spoken, whether they had received specific types of business training, employment history, time spent abroad, and ownership of different household assets. It elicited risk preferences, asked about motivations for wanting to operate a business, and measured self-confidence in the ability to carry out different entrepreneurial tasks. More detailed information about the business they wanted to operate included the name of the business, business sector, formal status, access to finance, taxes paid, challenges facing the business, and projected outcomes for turnover and employment.

The initial application and business plan submission were all done online. While they contain a rich set of data on these applicants, there were some measures which needed to be collected face-to-face with explanations, and so were left for follow-up surveys. Two ability measures were collected in the follow-up surveys: digit-span recall, and a Raven progressive matrices test of abstract reasoning. In addition, the grit measure of Duckworth et al. (2007) was also collected during these short-term follow-ups. We assume that these measures are stable over one to two years, and therefore include them as potential characteristics that could be used to predict future outcomes had they been collected at the time of application.

# **2.3 Measuring Success**

McKenzie (2017) tracked these firms in three annual follow-up surveys, and then in a five-year follow-up during a period of recession in Nigeria. We use data from the three-year follow-up survey, fielded between September 2014 and February 2015, to measure business success in this paper. This survey had a high response rate, with data on operating status and employment available for 2,140 of the 2,506 firms in our sample of interest (85.4 percent). We believe this is a more useful test than the five-year follow-up, which, in addition to a lower response rate, occurs in an atypical period in which Nigeria suffered its worst economic performance in thirty years, resulting in many firms struggling. Moreover, three years is the time horizon over which business plans were prepared (see next section).

We focus on four metrics of success: business operation and survival, total employment, sales, and profits. Appendix A.1 describes how these are measured. 93.5 percent of the competition winners were operating businesses three years after applying, compared to 58.4 percent of the control group and other non-winners. Figure 1 then plots the distributions of employment, sales, and profits outcomes for the winners and nonwinners. We see substantial dispersion in the outcomes of these firms three years after they applied for the program. For example, among winning firms in operation, a firm at the 90<sup>th</sup> percentile has 20 employees, 6