In view of limited empirical evidence concerning the microeconomic aspects of corporate financial problems in the East Asian countries in the 1990s, this paper analyses the financing pattern of corporate investment in Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand. The analysis is based on an...

One of the central explanations of the recent Asian Crisis has been the problem of moral hazard as the source of over-investment and excessive external borrowing. There is however rather limited firm-level empirical evidence to characterise inefficient use of internal and external finances....

Primary enrolment rates are very high in Peru, but so are the failure and drop-out rates. Thus an understanding of the nature of child schooling should consider school progression from primary to secondary and higher levels, taking account of the conditional sequence with the previous level and...

In the wake of the global financial crisis, several macroeconomic contributions have highlighted the risks of excessive credit expansion. In particular, too much finance can have a negative impact on growth. We examine the microeconomic foundations of this argument, positing a non-monotonic...

Current evidence on the relationships between growth and inequality is predominantly based on cross-country data sets or panel data sets covering a small number of time periods. But these relationships, being fundamentally dynamic in nature, need to be considered over a much longer time horizon....

This paper studies the relationship between leverage and growth, focusing on a large sample of firms in emerging economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE). Contrary to the general wisdom, we find that deviation from optimal leverage, especially excess leverage, is common among firms in many...

This paper examines the impact of ownership structures of emerging-market firms, which are shaped by local institutions, on the decision of these firms to undertake outward FDI. Our results suggest that family firms and firms with concentrated ownerships (both ubiquitous in emerging markets) are...