We use detailed survey data to document stark differences between West and East Ukraine when it comes to household attitudes toward market-based economies and democratic institutions. Along both of these dimensions, Eastern Ukrainians are decidedly less supportive of liberal systems. We also...

We study how information sharing between banks influences the geographical clustering of branches. We construct a spatial oligopoly model with price competition that explains why bank branches cluster and how the introduction of information sharing impacts clustering. Dynamic data on 59,333...

Understanding whether laws shape or simply reflect citizens' attitudes is important but empirically difficult. We provide new evidence on this question by studying the relationship between legal same-sex relationship recognition policies (SSRRPs) and attitudes toward sexual minorities in Europe....

We interview 361 European bank CEOs to identify their banks' main competitors. We then provide evidence on the drivers of bilateral bank competition, construct a novel competition measure at the locality level, and assess how well it explains variation in firms' credit constraints. We find that...

We study the impact of financial market development on industrial pollution in a large panel of countries and industries over the period 1974-2013. We find a strong positive impact of credit markets, but a strong negative impact of stock markets, on aggregate CO2 emissions per capita....

We exploit detailed data on approved and rejected small business loans to assess the impact of the introduction of a credit registry in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our findings are threefold. First, mandatory information sharing tightens lending at the extensive margin as more applications are...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

We exploit historical and contemporaneous variation in local credit markets across Russia to identify the impact of credit constraints on firm-level innovation. We find that access to bank credit helps firms to adopt existing products and production processes that are new to them. They introduce...

We study theoretically and empirically the demand for micro-credit under different liability arrangements and risk environments. A simple theoretical model shows that the demand for joint-liability loans can exceed that for individual-liability loans when risk-averse borrowers value their...

We present evidence from a randomized field experiment in rural Mongolia on the comparative poverty impact of group versus individual microcredit. We find a positive impact of group loans but not of individual loans on entrepreneurship and food consumption. Moreover, group borrowers are less...