than female business owners: 9, 12 and 15 percent of businesses owned by women formalized in groups 1, 2 and 3 respectively (2.1 percent in the control group), compared to 18 for those owned by men in group 1 and almost 25 percent for those in group 2 and 3 (4.7 percent in the control group). This result could be correlated with the fact that a large majority of businesses operating in Dantokpa market are owned by women. However, column 8 of the table shows that it is also true outside Dantokpa market for women not operating in trade.

In all groups, formalization rates were 5-10 percentage points higher outside Dantokpa market than inside the market. One potential explanation is that formalization could be less attractive in the market as businesses are already registered with the public company in charge of all markets in Cotonou (SOGEMA). They also usually have representatives in the market they can address in case of problems with the administration. Businesses operating in the trade sector had lower formalization rates than in other sectors. This result is correlated with the fact that almost all businesses in Dantokpa market are traders, but it is also true outside the market.<sup>12</sup> One possible explanation which was mentioned during qualitative interviews is that before the program implementation, traders already had access to a “trader card” that provides a formal status with specific benefits (see Table 1), whereas no such specific card existed for other sectors.

The program was more effective on businesses with an owner who went to at least secondary school, but is not significantly different with firm size per se. Using species classification techniques (de Mel et al, 2010) we classified 18 percent of the businesses in the sample as “looking more like formal businesses before the program”.<sup>13</sup> Formalization rates were 3-10 percentage points higher among informal businesses that were similar to formal businesses before program implementation. Finally, businesses that received more than one visit from a

> 12 Results not shown but available upon request.

> 13 Looking like a formal business owner is based on the predicted probability of being formal from a logit of formality status on baseline characteristics. This logit uses the data collected during the listing/baseline survey on 7,829 businesses who accepted the survey. Among them, 608 (7.8%) were formal at the time of the survey. We used the following baseline characteristics in the logit: operating in Dantokpa market, gender, age, only primary education, only JHS or SHS level, higher level of education, operating in services, craftsman, business created less than 1 year ago, firm connected to electricity network, total number of employees, firm is doing some accounting, have done any advertising in the last 6 months, log of total amount of sales in an average week, log amount of last month profit, firm owner owns a bank account, the firm pays taxes, have done any advertising in the last 6 months (and controls for missing levels of these variables). Using the “predict” command in STATA, we end up classifying as “looking more like formal” 654 (18.2%) businesses out of the 3,596 in the study sample. This classification was done before we got access to any follow-up data and was mentioned in the pre-analysis plan on the AEA social science registry website.

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