We examine how well several institutional- and firm-level factors explain firms' perceptions of property rights protection. The institutional theories we investigate account for approximately 50% of the country-level variation, indicating that current research addresses first-order factors....

The fast growth of Chinese private sector firms is taken as evidence that informal finance can facilitate firm growth better than formal banks in developing countries. We examine firm financing patterns and growth using a database of twenty-four hundred Chinese firms. While a relatively small...