How does uncertainty affect the costs of raising finance in the bond market and via bank loans? Empirically, this paper finds that heightened uncertainty is accompanied by an increase in corporate bond yields and a decrease in bank lending rates. This finding can be explained with a model that...

We suggest an explanation for the existence of “mission drift”, the tendency for Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) to lend money to wealthier borrowers rather than to the very poor. We focus on the relationship between MFIs and external funding institutions. We assume that both the MFIs and...

In this paper, we develop a network perspective on the welfare gains from trade in today’s internationally fragmented supply chains. Towards this end, we study a Ricardian trade model featuring trade in final and intermediate products, and introduce a novel comparative statics approach to...

The recent literature on firm-to-firm trade has documented salient empirical regularities of the buyer-seller network. We propose a simplistic re-interpretation of the classical Krugman (1980) model that accounts for surprisingly many of the empirical regularities. This re-interpretation relies...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the study of international trade that leads to a measure of country openness that is quite different from the various alternatives proposed by the received literature. In contrast to these, our measure does not use indicators of aggregate trade...

This paper studies structural change in production networks for intermediate inputs (input-output network) and new capital (investment network). For each network, we document a declining fraction of production by goods sectors and a rising fraction of production by services sectors. We develop a...

Peer-to-business lending refers to online platforms facilitating loans from individuals to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We conjecture that easy-to-understand risk ratings conveyed by the platform play a pronounced role in influencing the borrowing success of SMEs and that more...