We examine the effect of regional favoritism on firms’ access to credit. Using firm-level data on a large sample of 29,000 firms covering 48 countries, we investigate the hypothesis that access to credit of firms is higher in the birth regions of national political leaders. We find evidence...

Do sanctions strengthen the targeted regime? I analyze the 2014 imposition of Western sanctions on Russia and its impact on voting. The United States and the European Union introduced targeted measures against Russian entities and individuals related to President Putin’s regime. Using polling...

Nauro Campos (University College London) will present his research co-authored with Fabrizio Coricelli (University of Siena, Paris School of Economics and CEPR) and Marco Frigerio (University of Siena) entitled The Political U: New Evidence on Democracy and Income. Jarko Fidrmuc (Zeppelin...

We investigate whether the occurrence of elections affect access to credit for firms. We perform an investigation using firm-level data covering 44 developed and developing countries. We find that elections have a detrimental influence on access to credit: firms are more credit-constrained in...

How important is a relationship with a bank to a firm’s performance and survival? If firms can easily switch among different sources of credit supply, then the loss of any one source may have little implication for the firms that have borrowed from that source. However, to the extent that...

The literature on institutions and development has often cast societies in a light that contrasts the more inclusive, open-access, and equal ones with other less inclusive ones, but the scholarship comparing Imperial China and Premodern Europe does not fit easily in this framework. We provide a...