Information from 209 banks in 62 countries is used to develop new indicators of barriers to banking services around the world, show their correlation with measures of outreach, and explore their association with bank and country characteristics suggested by theory as potential determinants....

Using multi-year, firm-level surveys for 53 countries, this paper explores the impact of bank competition on firms' access to finance. We find that low competition, as measured by high values on the Lerner index or Boone indicator, diminishes firms’ access to finance. In addition, the impact...

Remittances are a substantial source of external financing for developing countries that influence many aspects of their development. Though research has shown that remittances are both expensive and price sensitive, little is known about what explains their price. Newly gathered data across 119...

This article introduces a large new cross-country database, the database of political institutions. It covers 177 countries over 21 years, 1975-95. The article presents the intuition, construction, and definitions of the different variables. Among the novel variables introduced are several...

A new database of World Bank loans to support financial sector development is used to investigate whether countries that received such loans experienced more rapid growth on standard indicators of financial development than countries that did not. Self-selection is accounted for with...

In recent years, the number of surveys on access to and use of financial services has multiplied, but little is known about whether the data generated are comparable across countries or within the same country over time. A randomized experiment in Ghana tested whether the identity of the...

Evidence based on firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure suggests that in low-income countries; labor growth is more rapid in countries with a higher level of private credit/GDP. This positive relationship with private credit is especially...

Recent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then depend on low costs. This paper calculates the costs of microcredit and other elements of the microcredit business model using proprietary data on 1,335 microfinance institutions...

In this article the authors use quantile regressions to assess the relationship between economic and financial development at each percentile of the distribution of economic development. Thus; the quantile regressions provide information on how the associations between economic development and...