This study is situated within the field of empirical operations management, investigating how financial inclusion policies shape the operational decisions of small-scale retailers in emerging markets. Nanostores (informal, family-operated micro-retailers) constitute a dominant retail format across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, yet remain largely understudied due to data limitations and their informal nature. Despite their economic significance, these retailers frequently operate under severe liquidity constraints, preventing them from optimizing inventory investment and product assortment. To establish causal identification, we leverage a natural experiment arising from the staggered rollout of a Buy-Now, Pay-Later (BNPL) program across a large panel of nanoretailers. Our empirical strategy employs a difference-in-differences estimator combined with matched control groups, allowing us to isolate the causal effect of BNPL access on inventory and assortment decisions while controlling for retailer heterogeneity and macroeconomic confounders. Robustness checks include event-study specifications to verify parallel pre-trends and placebo tests to rule out spurious treatment effects.
