This paper introduces a new database of financial reforms, covering 91 economies over 1973-2005. It describes the content of the database, the information sources utilized, and the coding rules used to create an index of financial reform. It also compares the database with other measures of...

Despite stops, gaps, and reversals, financial reforms advanced worldwide in the last quarter century. Using a new index of financial liberalization, we conclude that influential events shook the status quo, inducing both reforms and reversals, while learning, more so than ideology and country...

The study documents evidence of a quot;quality effectquot; of financial liberalization on allocative efficiency, which is measured by the dispersion in Tobin`s Q across firms. Based on a simple model, the authors predict that financial liberalization, by equalizing access to credit, reduces the...

Recent studies have found that capital moves quot;uphillquot; from poor to rich countries, and, when it does flow into poor economies, it brings little or no growth dividend. This stylization is emerging as a new orthodoxy, with predictive and normative implications. In this paper, we report...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is...

This paper uses firm-level data to examine the performance of India`s nonfinancial corporate sector since 1989 and evaluate its financial vulnerabilities. While promising trends in liquidity, profitability, and leverage of the sector emerged in the early 1990s, they experienced a reversal after...

We exploit random assignment of gender quotas across Indian village councils to investigate whether having a female chief councillor affects public opinion towards female leaders. Villagers who have never been required to have a female leader prefer male leaders and perceive hypothetical female...

The aim of the paper is to analyse the relationship between government expenditure volatility and long-run growth. Using cross-country panel data from 1970 to 2000, the paper finds that countries with higher government expenditure business-cycle volatility have lower growth, even after...

The aim of this article is to demonstrate regularity in the world income distribution. In particular, using GDP per capita data for the period 1980 to 2004, the article shows that the world income distribution follows the well know 'rank-size rule'.