In countries with weak investor protection, entrepreneurs transfer assets and cash in and out of companies with outside investors. The presence of debt can induce entrepreneurs to steal less from minority shareholders and may induce them to prop up the performance of publicly traded companies...

We develop a simple firm-based automaton model for global economic interdependence of countries using modern notions of self-organized criticality and recently developed dynamical renormalization-group methods. We demonstrate how extremely strong statistical correlations can naturally develop...

We construct a simple firm-based model of global interdependence. We show how extremely strong statistical correlations can naturally develop between countries even if the interconnections between those countries remain very weak. Potential policy implications of this result are also discussed.

Across 69 countries, higher tax rates are associated with less unofficial activity as a percent of GDP but corruption is associated with more unofficial activity. Entrepreneurs go underground not to avoid official taxes but to reduce the burden of bureaucracy and corruption. Dodging the...

The "Asian Crisis" of 1997-98 affected all the "emerging markets" open to capital flows. Measures of corporate governance, particularly the effectiveness of protection for minority shareholders, explain the extent of depreciation and stock market decline better than do standard macroeconomic...

The "Asian Crisis" of 1997-98 affected all the "emerging markets" open to capital flows. Measures of corporate governance, particularly the effectiveness of protection for minority shareholders, explain the extent of depreciation and stock market decline better than do standard macroeconomic...

In countries with weak legal systems, there is a great deal of tunnelling by the entrepreneurs who control publicly traded firms. However, under some conditions entrepreneurs prop up their firms, i.e., they use their private funds to benefit minority shareholders. We provide evidence and a model...