Research shows that most ventures fail, yet it has devoted limited attention to the consequences of entrepreneurs' past failure for investors' decisions. Our motivating insight is that failure can be due to bad luck, lack of skill or both. Therefore, failure conveys ambiguous information about...

Although the gender gap in entrepreneurs' success rates to secure funding is staggering, we know little about its causes. This is because observing both sides of investor-entrepreneur interactions (especially for unsuccessful pitches) is difficult in reality, and the associated extraordinary...

Despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows, the relationship between remittances and growth has not been adequately studied. This paper studies one of the links between remittances and growth, in particular how local financial sector development...

Poverty rates on Native American Indian reservations are triple the US average. Small business incubation programs, available elsewhere in the US, are sparse on the reservations. Small businesses are potent drivers of US economic growth. Some 25.5 million entrepreneurs generate more than 50% of...

This paper compares the impact of institutions on individual decisions to become entrepreneurs in the form of new business start ups by males and females across 44 developed and developing economies between 1998 and 2004. We test four hypotheses; that women are less likely to undertake...

This paper examines micro-level channels of how financial development can affect macroeconomic outcomes like the level of income and export intensity. We investigate theoretically and empirically how financial constraints affect a firm's innovation and export activities, using unique firm survey...

The paper examines the relationship between leverage and growth in a group of emerging central and eastern European countries, who are at different levels of financial market development. We hypothesize a non-linear relationship in that moderate leverage could boost growth while very high...

This paper examines a much overlooked link between credit markets and formalization: since access to bank credit typically requires compliance with tax and employment legislation, firms are more likely to incur such formalization costs once bank credit is more widely available at lower cost; if...

This paper argues that the level of financial services provision determines the risk management strategies among the poor. The paper estimates the determinants of the household's use of one, two or all three types of microfinancial services applying ordered probit models and additionally probit...

The vast majority of firms in developing economies are micro and small enterprises owned by families whose members also provide the labour to the units. Often, they fail to grow in size even with the relaxation of credit constraints. In this paper, we show that frictions in the labour market...