The sharp increase in Ramp;D investment in recent decades has important but unexplored implications for corporate liquidity management. Because Ramp;D has high adjustment costs and is financed with volatile sources, it is very expensive for firms to adjust the flow of Ramp;D in response to...

This paper provides novel evidence on the causal connections between legal institutions, credit markets, and real economic activity. Our analysis exploits an unexplored within-country setting—Native American reservations—together with quasi-experimental variation in legal contract...

The authors show that court enforcement uncertainty hinders economic development using sharp variation in judiciaries across Native American reservations in the United States. Congressional legislation passed in 1953 assigned state courts the authority to resolve civil disputes on a subset of...

This paper empirically investigates the institutional determinants of whether a tribal government invests in a casino. I find that the presence of Indian casinos is strongly related to plausibly exogenous variation in reservations’ legal and political institutions. Tribal governments that can...