Evidence is presented to show that shared codes, religious beliefs, ethnicity - cultural proximity - between lenders and borrowers improves the efficiency of credit allocation. In-group preferential treatment is identified using dyadic data on the religion and caste of bank officers and...

Government corruption is more prevalent in poor countries than in rich countries. This paper uses cross-industry heterogeneity in growth rates within Vietnam to test empirically whether growth leads to lower corruption. The analysis uses survey data collected from over 13,000 Vietnamese firms...

Deforestation in developing and middle income countries is an urgent global problem, affecting climate change, soil erosion, major river basins, and livelihoods of poor households living near the forests. Public discussions of the problem are frequently dominated by widely held beliefs...

There is perhaps only one broad certainty in the contemporary debate on climate change: not only does climate change affect different nations and communities differently, but the responses of individual stakeholders and institutions are also quite different, primarily because of their different...

Even though the economic and social benefits of thriving entrepreneurship and innovation are evident, it is critical to recognize that these benefits will only accrue if the key gaps in the ecosystem are addressed. Five key areas that an entrepreneur would need to address on a priority basis are...

A longitudinal household survey from World Bank Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) was used for the study. A relatively small (but representative) sample of households residing in the mountainous regions of Nepal (i.e., excluding the low-lying Terai regions) were surveyed in three...

This essay provides a game-theoretic, endogenous view of institutions, and then applies the idea to identify the sources of institutional trajectories of economic development in China, Japan, and Korea. It stylizes the Malthusian-phase of East Asian economies as peasant-based economies in which...

The existing literature on Indian growth finds no evidence of convergence across states. This represents a puzzle given the relatively free flows of capital, labor and commodities across state borders. A new data set of district level income and socio-economic data is used to explore the...

Motivated by the concern that the recent surge in inflation could retard growth, the paper revisits the nexus between inflation and growth from the perspective of an emerging economy, India. Examining this relationship using a wavelet multi resolution analysis with varying time scale...

Reviving economic growth is the priority of the government. [http://presidentofindia.nic.in/sp210213.html].