We apply a new approach to a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross-border equity flows between 14 countries, 1989-96. The remarkably good results have strong implications for theories of asset trade. We find that the geography of information heavily determines the pattern of international...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...

We examine a randomized trial that allows separate identification of peer screening and enforcement of credit contracts. A South African microlender offered half its clients a bonus for referring a friend who repaid a loan. For the remaining clients, the bonus was conditional on loan approval....

Innovative new ventures fail if they cannot attract resources needed to commercialise new ideas and inventions. Obtaining external resources is a central issue for nascent entrepreneurs - people who are in the process of starting new ventures. We argue in this paper that, a way to deal with this...

This Paper develops a model of economic growth and activity locating endogenously on a 3-dimensional featureless global geography. The same economic forces influence simultaneously growth, convergence, and spatial agglomeration and clustering. Economic activity is not concentrated on discrete...

Trading relations in Vietnam's emerging private sector are shaped by two market frictions: the difficulty of locating trading partners and the absence of legal enforcement of contracts. Examining relational contracting, we find that a firm trusts its customer enough to offer credit when the...

This paper investigates the role of credit in shaping economic recoveries and tries to shed some light on the phenomenon of creditless recoveries using industry-level data for a large sample of countries. We find that while a failure of the credit stock to recover to its pre-crisis level does...

In this paper we survey the common explanations of barter in transition economies and expose them to detailed survey data on 165 barter deals in Ukraine in 1997. The evidence does not support the notion that soft budget constraints, lack of restructuring, or that the virtual economy are the...

It is typically less profitable for an opportunistic borrower to divert inputs than to divert cash. Suppliers, therefore, may lend more liberally than banks. This simple argument is at the core of our contract theoretic model of trade credit in competitive markets. The model implies that trade...

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter -a payment in goods rather than cash - allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction...