We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs who work in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This difference is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial...

We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

This paper investigates a hitherto unexplored rationale for firms to enter into joint ventures. We model risky projects with autocorrelated productivity shocks as creating an option value of investing over time so that later investments benefit from the information revealed by the realization of...

This Paper empirically investigates the impact of distortions in the banking sector on the structure and dynamics of product markets as well as on firm level outcomes. Our analysis suggests that an increase in the efficiency of the banking industry can have first-order effects not only on the...

This paper examines the relationship between innovation and firms' dependence on external capital by analyzing the innovation activities of privately-held and publicly-traded firms We find that public firms in external finance dependent industries generate patents of higher quantity, quality,...

We provide evidence on the real effects of credit supply shocks utilizing a new firm-level database from six Latin American countries between 1990 to 2005. Holding creditworthiness constant through foreign currency debt exposure, we compare investment undertaken by domestic exporters to that of...