Alcázar, L. y Jaramillo, M. (2012). El impacto de la licencia municipal en el desempeño de las microempresas en el Cercado de Lima (Documentos de Investigación N° 64). Lima: GRADE.

Identifying the effects of an operating license on firm performance has become increasingly important in the face of the growing use of simplification reforms in Lima and other Latin American cities. This study seeks to identify the impact of the municipal operating license on the performance of microenterprises in Lima Cercado through an experimental research design. For this purpose, over a period of two and a half years, a sample of microenterprises in Cercado de Lima was followed in four rounds of surveys. Between the baseline and the first follow-up survey, an incentive exercise was implemented, whereby a randomly selected sub-sample of firms was offered a monetary incentive to obtain the license, with the objective of generating the exogenous variation necessary to adequately identify the impact of the license. The results show that the municipal license has no effect on the firms’ performance indicators, be they outcome (performance) variables such as revenues and profits per worker or intermediate outcome variables such as number of employees, access to credit, and investment in infrastructure and machinery (inputs).