by some other person, if the respondent refused to participate in the survey or could not be located.

We coded _survival_ to zero in the final round, if:

- the respondent was not owning a business; or

- the respondent said that, since January 2009, she had changed the industry in which the business was operating or she had closed down a business she was operating and then started a new business; or

- a proxy respondent said that the business was closed, if the respondent refused to participate in the survey or could not be located.

We coded _newfirmstart_ in round 5 (the final round) to one, if the business had been started after the previous survey round, or, since January 2009, the owner had either changed the industry in which the business was operating, started another business while still operating the original one, or closed down the original business and then started a new business. If the respondent was not operating a business in the final round or the business she was operating had been started before the previous survey round, we coded _newfirmstart_ to zero.

According to the criteria described above, _survival_ had been coded since baseline only in the second and final round. We hence recoded _survival_ in rounds 3 and 4, in order to reflect _survival_ since baseline, by recoding it to zero for all subsequent rounds, if it had been coded as zero in a given round and a new firm start had been coded in the same round or later.

_Sri Lanka Informal Enterprises Survey (SLINFORMALITY)_ The Sri Lanka Informal Enterprises Survey (SLINFORMALITY) was part of a field experiment that provided informal firms incentives to formalize. A sample of 520 informal firms owned either exclusively by men or jointly owned by husband and wife, with one to 14 paid employees in the two largest Sri Lankan cities – Colombo and Kandy – were randomly divided into four treatment groups and a control group. Details on sample selection, experimental and survey design can be found in de Mel et al. (2013).

The baseline survey was conducted in December 2008. Treatment was then assigned randomly, with 105 businesses being assigned to the control group. Three follow-up surveys were carried out in August 2010, March 2011 and December 2011, and we include data on the control firms from all four survey rounds in our sample.

We coded _survival_ from round to round to one, if, in a given wave, the owner was still engaged in the same line of business as in the previous survey round, and to zero, if the line of business had changed. In the last round, we were able to use information obtained from proxy respondents to code _survival_ , if the owner had refused to participate in the survey or could not be located. If the proxy respondent answered that the owner was still running the business, or the business was being run by an immediate family member, or the business was being run by some other person, we coded _survival_ to one. We coded _survival_ to zero if the proxy respondent said that the business was closed.

For rounds 3 and 4 we then recoded _survival_ , so that it reflected survival since baseline, by recoding it to zero for all subsequent rounds, if it had been coded as zero in a given round and a new firm start had been coded in the same round or later.

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