This paper reviews evidence on the benefits and challenges faced by governments migrating from cash to digital (electronic) government-to-person (G2P) payments. When supported by an appropriate consumer financial protection framework, digital payments enable confidential and convenient financial...

Why do some firms raise equity capital from a small number of "private” investors (e.g. Private Investment in Public Equities–PIPE), while other firms do so from a large number of small investors (e.g. Seasoned Equity Offering–SEO)? Recent studies list market timing, asymmetric...

The Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, launched by the World Bank in 2011, provides comparable indicators showing how people around the world save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The 2014 edition of the database reveals that 62 percent of adults worldwide have an...

This paper documents and analyzes gender differences in the use of financial services using individual-level data from 98 developing countries. The data, drawn from the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, highlight the existence of significant gender gaps in ownership of...

Using a comprehensive database of firms in Western and Eastern Europe, we study how the business environment in a country drives the creation of new firms. Our focus is on regulations governing entry. We find entry regulations hamper entry, especially in industries that naturally should have...

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...

A characteristic feature of U.S. monetary policy has been the active targeting of the overnight fed funds rate by the Federal Reserve. We show that during the 1989-1996 period, in spite of the effective targeting of the overnight fed funds rate, term fed funds rates displayed volatile and...

This paper presents data on 76 partial credit guarantee schemes across 46 developed and developing countries. Based on theory, the authors discuss different organizational features of credit guarantee schemes and their variation across countries. They focus on the respective role of government...

This paper studies the decision of firms to extend trade credit to customers and its relation with their financing decisions. The authors use a novel firm-level database of Chinese SMEs with unique information on market power in both output and input markets and on the amount, terms, and payment...

The authors examine the effects of taxation on financing policy using the corporate tax reform in 2001 in Croatia as a natural experiment. Since the extant literature on tax effects on capital structure studies listed firms in developed countries, it is worth investigating whether the same...