While the COVID-19 pandemic had a large and asymmetric impact on firms, many countries quickly enacted massive business rescue programs which are specifically targeted to smaller firms. Little is known about the effects of such policies on business entry and exit, factor reallocation, and...

Adding to the literature on factors driving corruption and bribery, this paper examines the effect of contestability in business operations on bribe solicitations. Contestability undermines bureaucratic rent-seeking potential and this paper tries to capture this empirically using cross-country...

How can the West's economic and political polarization be explained? We argue that persuasive lobbying at various levels of government leads to systematic deviations of policies from those desired by the majority. Implemented policies diverge from the majority position despite centripetal forces...

Against the background of a notoriously high macroeconomic instability and the need to raise tax revenues to meet the demands of public spending, this paper analyzes the tradeoff between growth and volatility of tax revenues in Latin America. We use a two-step Engle-Granger-type model to...

The consequences for countries of past foreign rule are the subject of a vast literature across history and the social sciences. This paper constructs a novel measure of past foreign (or minority) rule - the genetic distance of a country's ruling elite in the year 1900 from the country's ethnic...

An important strand of research in macro-finance investigates which factors impede enterprise investment, and quantifies their aggregate cost. In this paper, we make two contributions to this literature. The first contribution is methodological: we introduce a novel framework to calibrate...

I present the following proposal: information revealed during non-cartel investigations by competition law enforcement authorities, such as evaluation of M&As or investigation of monopolization (dominance) conduct, should be directly used to investigate and prosecute cartels. Currently, in...

In this paper we contribute to the literature on the structure of interlocking directorship networks and to the literature on the relationship between corporate governance and performance. We use a unique dataset made of corporate governance variables related to the board size and interlocking...

The paper investigates the survival of newly created small and medium enterprises in Brazilian manufacturing taking as reference the 1996-2005 period. The econometric analysis relies on time-varying version of the proportional hazard rate model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity. The...

This study compares incentive effects of various tax depreciation methods which are currently employed in selected OECD countries. Their generosity is determined on the basis of Samuelson s true economic depreciation. For this purpose, the present value model is applied. The central issue is...