Using a novel enterprise survey from Kenya (FinAccess Business), we document a strong positive association between the use of mobile money as a method to pay suppliers and access to trade credit. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, imperfect credit...

Data depth measures the centrality of a point with respect to a given distribution or data cloud. It provides a natural center-outward ordering of multivariate data points and yields a systematic nonparametric multivariate analysis scheme. In particular, the halfspace depth is shown to have...

This paper uses survey data for 60,000 households from 29 transition economies in 2006 and 2010 to explore how the use of banking services is related to household characteristics, as well as to bank ownership, deposit insurance and creditor protection. At the household level we find that the...

Abstract: This paper documents large cross-country variation in the relationship between bank competition and bank stability and explores market, regulatory and institutional features that can explain this variation. We show that an increase in competition will have a larger impact on banks’...

This paper gauges the effect of financial deepening and bank outreach on informality using micro data from the Indian manufacturing sector and exploiting cross-industry variation in the need for external finance. We distinguish between two channels through which access to finance can reduce...

We use a novel enterprise survey from Tanzania to gauge the relationship between saving instruments and entrepreneurial reinvestment. While most informal savings practices do not imply a lower likelihood of entrepreneurial reinvestment when compared with formal savings practices, we find a...

We assess the impact of bank deregulation on the distribution of income in the United States. From the 1970s through the 1990s, most states removed restrictions on intrastate branching, which intensified bank competition and improved bank performance. Exploiting the cross-state, cross-time...

Informality is a wide-spread phenomenon across the globe. We show that firms in countries with better information sharing systems and greater financial sector outreach evade taxes to a lesser degree, an effect that is stronger for smaller firms, firms in smaller cities and towns, and firms in...

While theory predicts different effects of household credit and enterprise credit on the economy, the empirical literature has mainly used aggregate measures of overall bank lending to the private sector. We construct a new dataset from 45 developed and developing countries, decomposing bank...

Abstract: Financial systems all over the world have grown dramatically over recent decades. But is more finance necessarily better? And what concept of finance – the size of the financial sector, including both intermediation and other auxiliary “non-intermediation” activities, or a focus...