This paper investigates the relationship between the coexistence of Islamic banks alongside their conventional counterparts and the quantitative and qualitative development of commercial banking and economic welfare. We study 22 Muslim countries with a dual banking system during the 1999-2009...

This paper investigates the link between export survival of agri-food products and financial development. Our hypothesis is that financial developement differentially affects the survival of exports across products based on their need of external finance. We propose a test for the role of...

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and employees increase with financial development. This effect is not explained by increased profits but by an increased value of non-monetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by building a...

The paper develops a simple model on the asymmetric role of credit markets in output fluctuations. When credit markets are underdeveloped and enterprise activity is financed by trade credit, shocks may induce a break-up of credit and production chains, leading to sudden and sharp contractions....

Using a database of more than 1,100 firms in the MENA region, this article looks at the determinants of demand for trade credit, particularly access to bank credit, size, age and the quality of the firm's financial structure. We show that the difficulty of gaining acces to bank credit positively...

This paper focuses on the relationships between remittances and the share of individuals working for less than 2$ US per day. It is based on an original panel dataset containing information related to remittances in about 80 developing countries and to the number of workers being paid less than...

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and the employees increase with financial development. This effect is not explained by increased profits but by an increased value of non- monetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by...

This paper analyze the survival of developing countries exports using the methodology developed by Rajan and Zingales (1998). An exporter faces multiple obstacles when entering new markets: imperfect information about the market, quality requirements of the importing countries, trade and...

This paper documents the co-evolution of social capital, measured as generalized trust, and financial development over the twentieth century. I use cross generations inherited trust of Americans with foreign ancestors to track trust in their home country in 1913 and 1990. The paper documents a...

This paper studies how firm-level export performance is affected by Real Exchange Rate (RER) volatility and investigates whether this effect depends on existing financial constraints. Our empirical analysis relies on export data for more than 100,000 Chinese exporters over the 2000-2006 period....