We investigate how communication within banks affects small business lending. Using travel time between a bank's headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times to evaluate the impact of within bank communication...

This paper explores the relationship between the relative size of the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector, economic growth, and poverty alleviation using a new database on the share of SME labor in the total manufacturing labor force. Using a sample of 45 countries, we find a strong,...

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights - such as the right of possession or the right of transfer - differentially impact outcomes, such as urban development? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into a standard model of urban land prices and density,...

A central requirement in the design of a legal system is the protection of law enforcers from coercion by litigants through either violence or bribes. The higher the risk of coercion, the greater the need for protection and control of law enforcers by the state. This perspective explains why, in...

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into a standard model of urban land prices and density, and makes predictions about investment in...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

A central challenge in securing property rights is the subversion of justice through legal skill, bribery, or physical force by the strong--the state or its powerful citizens--against the weak. We present evidence that the less educated and poorer citizens in many countries feel their property...

"This paper contributes to the literature on how a country's legal origin influences the operation of its financial system by using firm-level survey data on the obstacles that firms face in raising external finance. The paper assesses two channels through which legal origin may influence the...

This paper documents several new patterns associated with firms issuing stocks and bonds in foreign markets that motivate the need for and help guide the direction of future research. Three major patterns stand out. (1) A large and growing fraction of capital raisings, especially debt issuances,...