This study gauges the status of transition in the formerly centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, using a broad approach that compares countries with respect to their business environment, competition, and managerial practices; and assesses transition progress at the...

Geo-political tensions and disruptions to global value chains have led policy makers to re-evaluate their approach to globalisation. Many countries are considering friend-shoring – trading primarily with countries sharing similar values – as a way of minimising exposure to weaponisation of...

Using data on 10,769 firms across 22 emerging markets, we show that both credit constraints and weak green management hold back corporate investment in green technologies embodied in new machinery, equipment and vehicles. In contrast, investment in measures to explicitly reduce emissions and...

This paper reviews the process of job creation and destruction across a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade. It exploits a harmonized firm-level data-set drawn from business registers and enterprise census data. The paper assesses the importance of technological...

We use data on 11,233 firms across 22 emerging markets to analyze how credit constraints and low-quality firm management inhibit corporate investment in green technologies. For identification we exploit quasi-exogenous variation in local credit conditions and in exposure to weather shocks. Our...

This report provides a description of the first wave of household data collected for a randomised field experiment in Bosnia. The study intends to measure the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction among Bosnian households and the development of small enterprises that may otherwise not have...

We compare the importance of occupational gender segregation for the gender wage gap in East and West Germany in 1995 using a sample of social-security wage records of full-time workers. East Germany, which features a somewhat higher degree of occupational segregation, has a gender wage gap on...

Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by...

We use an RCT to analyse the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction in Bosnia. The study population are loan applicants that would normally have just been rejected based on regular screening. We find that access to credit allowed borrowers to start and expand small-scale businesses....

Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...