With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020, small business lending through fintech lenders collapsed. We explore the reasons for the market shutdown using detailed data about loan applications, offers, and take-up from a major small business fintech credit platform. We document that...

Ethnic Chinese networks, as proxied by the product of ethnic Chinese population shares, are found in 1980 and 1990 to have increased bilateral trade both within Southeast Asia and for other country pairs. Their effects within Southeast Asia are much greater for differentiated than for...

This paper examines how government funding programs geared towards early-stage companies interact with private capital markets. Using hand-collected data on 755 government programs worldwide, we find that governments' allocations to such funding programs have been comparable to global venture...

In this paper, I examine the argument that free trade may be harmful to less developed countries, because such international competition inhibits the formation of a local entrepreneurial class.I view the entrepreneur as the manager of the industrial enterprise, as well as the agent who bears the...

How does financial integration impact capital accumulation, current-account dynamics, and cross-country inequality? We investigate this question within a two-country, general-equilibrium, incomplete-markets model that focuses on the importance of idiosyncratic entrepreneurial risk-- a risk that...

We present new data on effective corporate income tax rates in 85 countries in 2004. The data come from a survey, conducted jointly with PricewaterhouseCoopers, of all taxes imposed on "the same" standardized mid-size domestic firm. In a cross-section of countries, our estimates of the effective...