Conventional wisdom depicts corruption as a tax on incumbent firms. This paper challenges this view in two ways. First, by arguing that corruption matters not so much because of the value of the bribe ("tax"), but because of another less studied feature of corruption, namely bribe...

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types of entrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generates hypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rights and especially...

This Paper studies the relationship between political wealth redistribution and the allocation of firm-ownership when production requires an unobservable input. The economy's wealth distribution affects the equilibrium interest rate and the allocation of entrepreneurial rents because wealth...

This paper introduces state-owned enterprises into an endogenous-growth model with an expanding variety of inputs. It shows that, if state firms are less efficient than private firms in organizing labour and also in adopting new technology, the rate of innovation and, hence, also the rate of...

The enterprise sectors of Eastern Europe are undergoing fundamental reform. This article evaluates alternative forms of corporate restructuring. It emphasizes differences in the sequence in which reforms are undertaken in different countries. In some countries, restructuring is being undertaken...

We study how credit supply shocks in the US, the euro area and Japan are transmitted to other economies. We use the recently-developed GVAR approach to model financial variables jointly with macroeconomic variables in 33 countries for the period 1983-2009. We experiment with inter-country links...

We develop a simple integration of banks into the Solow model. The objective is to provide a tractable benchmark for analyzing the long-term impact of crises on economic activities and growth. A fraction of firms have to rely on banks for financing their investments, while banks themselves face...

The global financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to an intensive research program analyzing a wide range of issues related to financial crises. This paper presents a summary of a forthcoming book, Financial Crises: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses, that includes 19 contributions...

International financial integration helps to diversify risk but also may increase the transmission of crises across countries. We provide a quantitative analysis of this trade-off in a two-country general equilibrium model with endogenous portfolio choice and collateral constraints. Collateral...

We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...