This paper investigates the differential impacts of foreign ownership on wages for different types of workers (in terms of educational background and gender) in Vietnam using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002 and 2004. Whereas most previous studies have compared wage levels...

This paper investigates how government interventions into banking systems such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. This debate is important because the pricing of banking products has implications for borrower and...

This paper describes a new index of the quality of the business environment for microfinance institutions (the Global Microscope on the Microfinance Business Environment). Regressions are used to validate the index by linking it and its subcomponents to microfinance outcomes. The main findings...

Microcredit programs in Bangladesh have experienced spectacular growth in recent years, with a growing number of borrowers availing credit from multiple microcredit agencies. There is a growing concern that if there are not sufficient returns to borrowing from microfinance institutions (MFIS),...

Whether the likelihood of a credit boom ending is dependent on its age or not, or whether the respective behavior is smooth or bumpy are important issues to which the economic literature has not given attention yet. This paper tries to fill that gap, exploring those issues with a proper duration...

As the Eurozone crisis drags on, it is evident that a part of the problem lies in the architecture of debt and its liabilities within the Eurozone and, more generally, the European Union. This paper argues that a large part of the problem can be mitigated by permitting appropriately-structured...

One of the persistent policy problems faced by governments contemplating financial liberalizations is the question of whether to allow foreign banks entry into the domestic economy. This question has become ever more urgent in recent times, due to rapid financial globalization, coupled with the...

This paper examines the role of firms'government connections, defined by government intervention in the appointments of Chief Executive Officers and the status of state ownership, in determining the severity of financial constraints faced by Chinese firms. In line with the previous literature,...

Firm surveys often indicate that firms complain a lot about lack of access to financial services, but financing constraints are difficult to identify, given demand and supply considerations and with only surveys based on firms'perceptions. Specifically, it is difficult to separate demand for...

Using a unique firm level data set -- the Enterprise Surveys -- this paper develops a new measure of credit-constrained status for firms using hard data instead of perceptions data. The paper classifies firms into four ordinal categories: Not Credit Constrained, Maybe Credit Constrained,...