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...

Under the traditional quot;competition-fragilityquot; view, more bank competition erodes market power, decreases profit margins, and results in reduced franchise value that encourages bank risk taking. Under the alternative quot;competition-stabilityquot; view, more market power in the loan...

We formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank ownership type - foreign, state-owned, and private domestic banks - in banking relationships. Our application uses data from India, an important developing nation. The empirical results are consistent with all of our hypotheses with regard...

The authors test competing theories of capital structure choices using firm-level data on firm borrowings. The majority of firms in the dataset are privately owned, young, micro or small and medium enterprise (SME) firms concentrated in the service sector. In general, the financing pattern of...

Aggarwal and Klapper study the relationship between ownership structure, corporate governance, and the initial public offering (IPO) process. They examine equity ownership by different institutions, such as foreign and domestic financial institutions, banks with and without lending...