For capital markets to function, political institutions must support capitalism in general and the capitalism of financial markets in particular. Yet capital markets' shape, support, and extent are often contested in the polity. Powerful elements — from politicians to mass popular movements...

Strong financial markets are widely thought to propel economic development, with many in finance seeing legal tradition as fundamental to protecting investors sufficiently for finance to flourish. Kenneth Dam, in the Law-Growth Nexus, finds that the legal tradition view inaccurately portrays how...

Theoretical work suggests an ambiguous relationship between the strength of institutions and the distribution of access to finance. Using a sample of listed firms from 70 countries, this study constructs country-level measures of inequality in access to external finance, and explores its...

Collective action at impersonal scale involves losses to autonomy by definition because of the need to centralize some measure of authority. This stands as an important cost to collective action that varies in predictable ways depending on the extent of organizational choice available to...

This paper examines the effect of competition on bank stability particularly the contagion effect in rural banking market using spatial panel econometrics methodology. We obtain quarterly data from 2014 to 2017 focusing in a single country, Indonesia, as it has the largest number of rural banks...

We study how information sharing between banks influences the geographical clustering of branches. A spatial oligopoly model first explains why branches cluster and how information sharing impacts price competition and equilibrium clustering. With data on 59,333 branches of 676 banks in 22...

Existing texts in economic development do not explain why micro credit loans often carry very high interest rates. Since many students are likely to perceive high interest rates on loans to the very poor as unfair or exploitative, I develop a simple model of a lending firm in which the necessity...

This paper looks at an institutional innovation in which Western investors lend peer-to-peer to poor country enterprises. Using a unique dataset from an online lending platform called MyC4, we find that MyC4’s Western lenders grant lower interest rates to pro-poor, socially responsible (SR),...

This paper tests for the sensitivity of R&D to financing constraints conditional on restrictions in external financing. Financing constraints of firms are identified by an exogenously calculated rating index. Restrictions in external financing are determined by (i) the specific time period...