We run a novel field experiment to link managers of African manufacturing firms.  The experiment features exogenous link formation, exogenous seeding of information and exogenous assignment to treatment and placebo.  We study the impact of the experiment on firm business practices outside of...

Using novel data on European firms, this paper examines the effect of business group affiliation on innovation. We find that business groups foster the scale and novelty of corporate innovation. Group affiliation is particularly important in industries that rely more on external finance and have...

This paper analyses the survival of the complete cohort of more than 162,000 limited companies incorporated in Britain in 2001 over the subsequent five-year period.  For this purpose, we estimate firms' hazards of failure and survival functions using nonparametric and semi-parametric...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did it make a contribution to industrial development in Interwar Britain?  The interwar stock market laboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffective...

We use a panel of over 120,000 Chinese firms of different ownership types over the period 2000-2007 to analyze the linkages between investment in fixed and working capital and financing constraints.  We find that those firms characterized by high working capital display high sensitivities of...

We present cross-country empirical evidence on the role of natural resources in explaining long-run differences in private investment as a share of GDP in a sample of 72 developing countries.  Our empirical results suggest important differences between oil and non-oil resources.  While revenue...

This paper extends the model of Fielding (1999), which is designed to explain changes in investment in South Africa during the Apartheid period, by allowing a role for indicators of political instability and political and civil rights, as measured by Fedderke et al. (1999). The conclusions based...

We present evidence that an increase in investment as a share of GDP predicts a higher growth rate of output per worker, not only temporarily, but also in the steady state. These results are found using pooled annual data for a large panel of countries, using pooled data for non-overlapping...

This paper examines an open economy model in which equilibrium unemployment depends on capacity in the traded-goods sector. The model is estimated using U.K. quarterly data and compared with alternative concepts of equilibrium unemployment based on labour market variables (as in Layard and...

Much recent monetary policy literature has searched for structural models suitable for policy analysis that are both based on optimising microfoundations and consistent with the data, especially observed persistence in inflation and output. Few models do well on both criteria. We derive an...