This paper investigates the relation between financial development and firm size. The model shows that the quality of laws, by affecting the level of monitoring costs, has an effect on risk sharing and, through this channel, on the investor basis and the availability of external finance to...

This paper examines how firm characteristics, legal rules and financial development affect corporate finance decisions. In contrast to the existing literature, I use data on unlisted companies to show that institutions play an important role in determining the extent of agency problems. In...

I show that liquidity constraints are related to individuals' occupational choice. A proxy for the prospect of becoming liquidity constrained affects negatively the probability of being self-employed as opposed to being employed in the private or the public sectors. Furthermore, individuals with...

We relate trade credit to product characteristics and aspects of bank-firm relationships and document three main empirical regularities. First, the use of trade credit is associated with the nature of the transacted good. In particular, suppliers of differentiated products and services have...

We show that individuals residing in highly entrepreneurial neighborhoods are more likely to become entrepreneurs and invest more in their own businesses, even though their entrepreneurial profits are lower and their alternative job opportunities more attractive. These findings are robust to the...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that investor protection affects the demand for equity, but existing theories emphasize only the effect of investor protection on the supply of equity. We build a model showing that the demand for equity is important in explaining stock market development. If the...

Exploiting the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s as a laboratory, we investigate the effects of bank bailouts on the supply of credit and on the valuations and the real performance of banks' clients. Consistent with recent theories, our findings indicate that the size of the capital...

We investigate whether cultural differences between professional decision-makers affect financial contracts in a large dataset of international syndicated bank loans. We find that more culturally distant lead banks offer borrowers smaller loans at a higher interest rate and are more likely to...

Using a sample that provides unprecedented detail on foreign listings for 29 exchanges in 24 countries starting from the early 1980s, we show that although firms list in countries with better investor protection, they are less likely to list in countries with excessively stronger investor...

Using a novel dataset that allows us to trace the bank relationships of a sample of mostly unlisted firms, we explore which borrowers are able to benefit from foreign bank presence in emerging markets. Our results suggest that the limits to financial integration are less tight than the static...