Mutual funds industry has been sought by French politicians as mediation between the popular savings and company’s investments through the financial markets. Questioning the link between finance and industry requires analyzing the effectiveness of this mediation. This article intends firstly...

For many centuries, forms of Islamic charity such as zakat (i.e. "obligatory" alms) and waqf (i.e. endowment or philanthropic foundation) have proven to be essential tools for economic and human development. Both of these schemes aim to reduce income inequality and to encourage productive...

We explore which financial constraints matter the most in the choice of becoming an entrepreneur. We consider a randomly assigned welfare program in rural Mexico and show that cash transfers signi cantly increase entry into entrepreneurship. We then exploit the cross-household variation in the...

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and employees increase with financial development. This effect is not explained by increased profits but by an increased value of non- monetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by building a...

This paper is the first to draw a global picture of worldwide microfinance equity by taking full advantage of daily quoted prices. We revisit previous findings showing that investors should consider microfinance as a self-standing sector. Our results are threefold. First, microfinance has become...

Is the impact of financial development on international trade heterogeneous – being positive, negative or null – across manufacturing sectors? And is it dependent on the level of sectoral requirement on external finance for capital need? To examine these questions this article uses a panel...