Countries around the world face a retirement crisis brought on by aging populations, declining birthrates, and fiscal shortfalls. As a result, policy makers increasingly seek to understand retirement savings patterns, a crucial component of the safety net for the elderly. Drawing on the 2014...

This paper uses new survey data to measure the government's capacity to deliver goods and services in a manner that includes: high coverage of the population; equal access; and high quality of service delivery. The paper finds variation in these indicators across and within Indian states....

This paper draws on new individual-level survey data from India to study the costs of opening an account and the efficiency of the account application process. The data show a recent increase in account ownership, especially by women and poor adults. The data also suggest that India's flagship...

The Global Findex database is the world's most comprehensive set of data on how people make payments, save money, borrow and manage risk. Launched in 2011, it includes more than 100 financial inclusion indicators in a format allowing users to compare access to financial services among adults...

There is currently a large interest in understanding firms' access to finance, particularly in the financing of small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). But the financing patterns of SMEs across countries is not well understood. For example, little is known about the relative importance of...

The authors contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth, and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993-2000 on 49 nations....

The benefits of cross-listing for a foreign issuer are extensively documented in the literature, however it is not clear what motivates investors to hold American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock of these issuers. We analyze the investment allocation decision of mutual...

Previous research has documented weak, and sometimes conflicting, effects of legal quality on measures of firm debt. Using WorldScope data for 1,689 firms as well as more detailed proprietary data for 315 firms across nine East Asian countries, we find that access to foreign financing appears to...

Using a comprehensive database of firms in Western and Eastern Europe, we study how the business environment in a country drives the creation of new firms. Our focus is on regulations governing entry. We find entry regulations hamper entry, especially in industries that naturally should have...

Recent research studying the link between law and finance has concentrated on country-level investor protection measures and focused on differences in legal systems across countries and legal families. Klapper and Love extend this literature and provide a study of firm-level corporate governance...