Firms operating in corrupt environments routinely face an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, bribery can be used as an efficient strategy to “get things done”. On the other hand, corruption is unethical, illegal, and a social ill that people detest. A corrupt environment is also...

We provide one of the first comprehensive and most updated studies on the effects of firms’ organizational resources, country institutions, and national culture on the survival and growth of private firms around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing World Bank Enterprise Follow-up...

We employ World Bank Enterprise Survey data collected in 2006-2010 for 21,852 firms from 31 Latin American and Caribbean countries to investigate determinants of the adoption of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification, the relation between ISO certification and firm...

We employ 19,521 unique firms in 30 transition economies to investigate the relation between the origins of private firms and their financing patterns. In our sample, the private firms are either privatized former state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or ab initio (from the beginning) private firms....

This paper examines the impact of financial reporting practices on corruption obstacles for about 150,000 firms across 143 mostly developing countries from 2006–2019. We document a strong positive relationship between the production of audited financial statements (AFS) and corruption...

Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data from 2006-2017 on 130,000 firms in 130 countries across the globe, we document that women-led firms tend to underperform men-led firms. The main contribution of this work is to shed light on three mechanisms that help explain the...

We examine the relation between financing patterns and firm growth in transition economies. Using a survey dataset covering over 20,000 firms in 30 Eastern European and Central Asian countries from 2002-2014, we find that firms using formal bank finance grow faster than those financed by...

This paper investigates the relation between ownership structure and firm value across a sample of 5,284 firm years of China's partially privatized former state-owned enterprises (SOE) from 1991-2001. We find that state and institutional shares are significantly negatively related to Tobin's Q,...

We study the relation between state ownership and cash holdings in China's share-issue privatized firms from 2000 to 2012. We find that the level of cash holdings increases as state ownership declines. For the average firm in our sample, a 10 percentage-point decline in state ownership leads to...

In this study, we employ the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data collected in 2002, 2005, and 2009 for 21,499 firms from 27 Eastern European and Central Asian countries to examine firm-level growth constraints faced by privatized firms versus those faced by the originally (de novo) private...