Recent empirical work has shown that financial development is important for economic growth, since well-developed financial markets are more effective at allocating capital to firms with high-value projects. This raises the question of whether firms with high return projects in countries with...

The authors reexamine the role of financial market development in the intersectoral allocation of resources. First, they characterize the assumptions underlying previous work in this area, in particular, that of Rajan and Zingales (1998). The authors argue that Rajan and Zingales (1998)...

The authors analyze the relationship between financial development and inter-industry resource allocation in the short and long run. They suggest that in the long run, economies with high rates of financial development will devote relatively more resources to industries with a "natural" reliance...

The relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties is an important element in the recent debate on institutional design. The theoretical literature makes ambiguous predictions about this relationship, and it has remained...

Exploiting a unique data set containing information about the estimated bribe payments of Ugandan firms, the authors study the relationship between bribe payments, taxes, and firm growth in Uganda for the period 1995-97. Using industry-location averages to circumvent the potential problem of...

One of the alleged benefits of the recent global movement to strengthen intellectual property rights (IPRs) is that such reforms accelerate transfers of technology between countries. The paper examines how technology transfer among U.S. multinational firms changes in response to a series of IPR...

This paper evaluates effectiveness of microfinance using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method applied to data collected in a recent randomized control trial. This method allows one to answer an additional set of questions not answered by the original study and provide more nuanced evidence by...

Combining multi-year, firm-level surveys with country-level panel data for 53 countries, the authors explore the impact of bank competition on firms' access to finance. They find that low competition, as measured by high values of the Lerner index, diminishes firms' access to finance, while...

Using firm-level surveys for up to 73 countries, this paper explores the impact of introducing collateral registries for movable assets on firms' access to bank finance. It compares firms' access to bank finance in seven countries that introduced collateral registries for movable assets against...

This paper provides new evidence on the factors affecting protracted credit contraction in the wake of the global financial crisis. The paper applies panel vector autoregressions to a global panel that consists of quarterly data for 41 countries for the period 2000-2011 and documents that...