With extensive country- and firm-level data sets we first document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We also find that population density appears to be considerably more important...

We provide a comprehensive review of firms’ financing channels (internal and external, domestic and international) around the globe, with the focus on alternative finance—financing from all the nonmarket, non-bank external sources. We argue that while traditional financing channels,...

Economic growth in Africa has long been disappointing. We document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We examine the factors that are associated with financial development in Africa...

We study a competitive model in which market incompleteness implies that debt-financed firms may default in some states of nature and default may lead to the sale of the firms’ assets at fire sale prices when markets are illiquid. This incompleteness is the only friction in the model and the...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay for a risky security. We relate this measure to consumers' endowments and attributes and to measures of background risk and liquidity constraints. We find...

In this paper we focus on poor financial literacy as one potential factor explaining lack of portfolio diversification. We use the 2007 Unicredit Customers' Survey, which has indicators of portfolio choice, financial literacy and many demographic characteristics of investors. We first propose...

Rational investors perceive correctly the value of financial information. Investment in information is therefore rewarded with a higher Sharpe ratio. Overcon.dent investors overstate the quality of their own information, and thus attain a lower Sharpe ratio. We contrast the implications of the...

The paper reports an experimental study based on a variant of the popular Chinos game, which is used as a simple but paradigmatic instance of observational learning. There are three players, arranged in sequence, each of whom wins a fixed price if she manages to guess the total number of coins...

The paper generalizes a costly state verification model along two dimensions: 1) diversity of opinions, and 2) endogenous formation of a financial intermediary, modeled as a multilender coalition. In contrast with previous contributions (e.g. [35] and [36]), our model can account for the...

Using the results of risk-adjusted linear-quadratic-Gaussian optimal control with perfect and imperfect observation of the economy, we obtain prudent Taylor rules for monetary policies and also allow for imperfect information and cautious Kalman filters. A prudent central bank adjusts the...