Can policymakers improve macroeconomic performance by encouraging the entry of high-performance startups? To answer this question, we construct a novel and comprehensive data set on 1.3 million startups in ten European countries. We apply cluster analysis to identify distinct startup types and...

Do laws shape or simply reflect society's attitudes? This paper provides new evidence on this question by studying the relationship between legal same-sex relationship recognition policies and attitudes towards sexual minorities in Europe. We show that when relationships are recognised by law,...

We use data on 11,233 firms across 22 emerging markets to analyse how credit constraints and low-quality firm management inhibit corporate investment in green technologies. For identification, we exploit quasi-exogenous variation in local credit conditions and in exposure to weather shocks. Our...

The 2015 Paris Climate Conference put finance at the heart of the debate on environmental degradation. But what exactly is the relationship between finance and environmental pollution? This paper analyses the mechanisms that connect financial development, industrial composition and environmental...

We study how information sharing between banks influences the geographical clustering of branches. A spatial oligopoly model first explains why branches cluster and how information sharing impacts price competition and equilibrium clustering. With data on 59,333 branches of 676 banks in 22...

Does state ownership hinder or help firms access credit? We use data on almost 4 million firms in 89 countries to study the relationship between state ownership and corporate leverage. Controlling for country-sector-year fixed effects and conventional firm-level determinants of leverage, we show...

We study basic information treatments regarding sexual orientation using randomized experiments in three countries with strong and widespread anti-gay attitudes: Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Participants who received information about the economic costs to society of sexual-orientation...

Before Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s financial sector was small, fragmented and overly reliant on state banks. The sector has nevertheless weathered the initial shock of the war relatively well, reflecting the central bank’s restructuring efforts over the past decade. Even...

Inequality of opportunity – that is, how a person's potential to succeed in life is determined by the circumstances of their birth – is the result of an economy that has failed to fairly tie incentive to effort and investment. But any limitations on economic activity caused by this failure...

In this paper we study the quantity-quality trade-off among professionals and how this trade-off may change in the presence of concerns over self-image. Concern over self-image (self-reputation) can motivate performance at work (Bénabou and Tirole, 2002), but there is little empirical work to...