This paper examines the empirical link between severance pay and corporate finance. Severance pay is an economic debt of the employer and hence should be taken into account by the market in its assessments of risk. Using a hand collected dataset of accounting data from Italy and Austria we find...

This paper studies the effect of product market competition on the compensation packages that firms offer to their executives and in particular its impact on the sensitivity of pay to performance. To measure the effect of competition we use two different identification strategies on a panel of...

We assess the willingness to pay (WTP) for eyeglasses in an adult population in rural Burkina Faso using a variant of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) method. We combine the BDM approach with video and deferred payment options to analyze the role of information and liquidity constraints....

Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the...

When a deficit occurs in the funding of collective goods, it is usually covered by raising the amount of taxes or by rationing the supply of the goods. This article compares the efficiency of these institutions. We report the results of a 2x2 experiment based on a game in the first stage of...

Does the availability of internal finance constrain firm growth? Or does it foster it? To answer these questions, we use a panel of 407,096 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We estimate dynamic assets growth equations augmented with cash flow, and find that the growth of state owned...

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...

Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that labor's interest may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the supervisory board could well have an interest in increasing incentive-based...

We document the recent phenomenon of uphill flows of capital from nonindustrial toindustrial countries and analyze whether this pattern of capital flows has hurt growth innonindustrial economies that export capital. Surprisingly, we find that there is a positivecorrelation between current...