Many small businesses closed in the pandemic, but were economic losses disproportionately felt by businesses owned by people of color? This paper provides the first study of the impacts of COVID-19 on racial inequality in business earnings. Pandemic-induced losses to business earnings in 2020...

Economic development is often held to be beneficial for gender equality. However, there is good reason to believe that long lasting institutions like religion, legal traditions, and family practices, also matter. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the relative importance of...

China's development model challenges the approaches of traditional Western donors like the World Bank. We argue that both aim at stability, but differ in the norms propagated to achieve that. Using fixed effects and IV estimations, we analyze a broad range of subnational stability measures in...

We analyze the extent of the integrated control of the state over privatized firms during the post-privatization decade (1995-2005) in the Czech Republic. During this period the integrated control potential of the state resembled a corporate pyramid. While pyramidal control was not fully...

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of the links between the gender of an entrepreneur, access to finance, occupational choice, and business performance. Our theoretical model predicts that, when lenders discriminate against women entrepreneurs, the average entrepreneurial skill of...

In this paper, we traced the survival status of 94,401 small businesses in 17 European emerging markets from 2007–2017 and empirically examined the determinants of their survival, focusing on institutional quality and financial development. We found that institutional quality and the level of...

We study the relationship between housing inequality and crime in South Africa. We create a novel panel dataset combining information on crimes at the police station level with census data. We find that housing inequality explains a significant share of the variation in both property and violent...