Extending the important study by Beck, Demirguc-Kunt and Levine (2007), we examine the effects of borrower and lender competition and information sharing via credit registries/bureaus on corruption in bank lending. Using the unique dataset of the World Business Environment Survey (WBES) compiled...

Both ownership and regulation affect the behavior of utility managers. Private ownership rewards managerial decisions that enhance shareholder value. Regulatory incentives reward behavior that affects profits and costs. An empirical analysis of 24 Ukraine electricity distribution companies from...

This article investigates whether the business relations between mutual funds and brokerage firms influence sell-side analyst recommendations. Using a unique data set that discloses brokerage firms' commission income derived from each mutual fund client as well as the share holdings of these...

Using a large, unique, firm-level dataset from the Chinese manufacturing sector, we study important factors that are related to emission intensity for three pollutants in China – sulfur dioxide, wastewater, and soot. Our main findings are as follows: (1) compared to state-owned enterprises...

In a finite-trader version of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model, the symmetric, ex-ante efficient allocation is implementable by a direct mechanism (i.e., each trader announces the type of his own ex-post preference) in which truthful revelation is the strictly dominant strat-egy for each trader....

Recent studies in the law and finance literature have shown that property rights protection is central to corporate financing and investment decisions and economic growth at large. We extend this literature by examining the effect of property rights security on corporate risk management...

Looking at a sample of nearly 2,400 banks in 69 countries, we find that stronger creditor rights tend to promote greater bank risk taking. Consistent with this finding, we also show that stronger creditor rights increase the likelihood of financial crisis. On the plus side, we find that stronger...

We use a unique World Bank survey of 1088 private manufacturing firms from 18 Chinese cities over the period 2000-2002 to empirically examine the roles of managerial incentives and CEO characteristics in a firm's innovation activities. We look at both innovation effort (R&D intensity) and...

Building on the important study by Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine [2006. Bank supervision and corruption in lending. Journal of Monetary Economics 53, 2131-2163], we examine the effects of both borrower and lender competition as well as information sharing via credit bureaus/registries on...

Following the recent literature on institutions and economic growth, we examine the effects of property rights protection on corporate R&D. Using a unique 2003 World Bank survey of over 2400 firms in 18 Chinese cities, we obtain the following findings: (1) property rights protection is...