The authors study the effect of reorganization costs on the efficiency of bankruptcy laws. They develop a simple model that predicts that in a regime with high costs, the law fails to achieve the efficient outcome of liquidating unviable businesses and reorganizing viable ones. The authors test...

This paper presents an analysis of the finances of Egyptian listed companies evaluating recent trends in growth and profitability during the 1995-2001 period. The data from financial statements reveal the effect of the economic slowing of the past few years, especially in the construction and...

Recent research studying the link between law and finance has concentrated on country-level investor protection measures and focused on differences in legal systems across countries and legal families. Klapper and Love extend this literature and provide a study of firm-level corporate governance...

Although it is widely accepted that financial development is associated with higher growth, the evidence on the channels through which credit affects growth on the micro-level is scant. Using data from a cross section of Bulgarian firms, the authors estimate the impact of access to credit (as...

We apply vector autoregression (VAR) to firm-level panel data from 36 countries to study the dynamic relationship between firms' financial conditions and investment. We argue that by using orthogonalized impulse-response functions we are able to separate the 'fundamental factors' (such as...

Love and Mylenko combine firm-level data from the World Bank Business Environment Survey (WBES) with data on private and public credit registries to investigate whether the presence of a credit registry in a country is associated with lower financing constraints, as perceived by managers, and...

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

This paper studies the effect of financial crises on trade credit in a sample of 890 firms in six emerging economies. We find that although provision of trade credit increases right after the crisis, it consequently collapses in the following months and years. We observe that firms with weaker...

Himmelberg, Hubbard, and Love combine the agency theory of the firm with risk diversification incentives for insiders. Principal-agent problems between insiders and outsiders force insiders to retain a larger share in their firm than they would under a perfect risk diversification strategy. The...

Microeconomic evidence from 40 countries shows that financial development aids growth by reducing financing constraints that would otherwise restrict efficient firm investment.The relationship between the financial and real sides of the economy has long been a topic of intense interest and...