China is the world’s largest investor and greatest contributor to global economic growth by wide margins, and will remain so for many years. The efficiency of its financial system in allocating capital to investment will be important to sustain this growth. This paper shows that China’s...

What are the incentives faced by local officials in China? Without democratic institutions, there is no mechanism for local residents to exercise "voice". Given the hukou registration system, local residents have little opportunity to threaten "exit" if they are unhappy with local taxes and...

Weak institutions ought to deter foreign direction investment (FDI), and mass media stories highlight China's institutional deficiencies, yet China is now one of the world's largest FDI destinations. This incongruity characterizes China's paradoxical growth. Cross-country regressions show that...

In the recent financial crisis, macroeconomic stimuli produced mixed results across developed economies. In contrast, China's stimulus boosted real GDP growth from an annualized 6.2% in the first quarter of 2009 trough to 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010. Amidst this phenomenal response, land...

Financial frictions distort the allocation of resources among productive units--all else equal, firms whose financing choices are affected by such frictions face higher borrowing costs than firms with ready access to capital markets. As a result, input choices may differ systematically across...

We partnered with a micro‐lender in Mali to randomize credit offers at the village level. Then, in no- loan control villages, we gave cash grants to randomly selected households. These grants led to higher agricultural investments and profits, thus showing that liquidity constraints bind with...

The investment decisions of small‐scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can reduce investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana...

This paper describes our construction of the Global Financial Development Database and uses the data to compare financial systems around the world. The database provides information on financial systems in 205 economies over the period from 1960 to 2010 and includes measures of (1) size of...

We quantify the causal effect of foreign investment on total factor productivity (TFP) using a new global firm-level database. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting the difference in the amount of foreign investment by financial and industrial investors and simultaneously controlling...

Small-scale farming remains the primary source of income for a majority of the population in developing countries. While most farmers primarily work on their own fields, off-farm labor is common among small-scale farmers. A growing literature suggests that off-farm labor is not the result of...