It is well known that Micro and Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the economy. Most of these companies use external financing sources like debt and equity capital to finance their activities. However, in general, in the area of SMEs' access to finance, there are...

The Financial Sector Reforms Commission (FSLRC) which was set up in 2011 by the Ministry of Finance was mandated to study existing legislation and financial sector regulatory practices in India and to propose improvements. The FSLRC submitted its report in 2013 and four of its members recorded...

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

The ownership nationality of large US multinational companies plays an implicit but important role in the current debate over how such companies should be taxed. This paper identifies that role and investigates what is actually known about where these companies’ shareholders reside

We use the introduction of a U.S. commercial credit bureau to study when lenders adopt voluntary information sharing technology and the resulting consequences for competition and credit access. Our results suggest that lenders trade off access to new markets against heightened competition for...

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities....

Financial inclusion or access to financial services is a major development goal for all nations across the globe. The concept has a multitude of dimensions from payments and savings accounts, credit, insurance and pensions and securities market. Ensuring quality access to formal financial...

Transaction costs impose a barrier to savings, but lowering them may have smaller impacts than expected due to other constraints, such as psychological biases. Within the context of retirement savings under defined contributions in the privatized pension system in Mexico, we analyze two...

Concurrent with the rapid development of the market for catastrophe (cat) bonds, a steady decline in their risk premia has been observed. Whether the latter trend is consistent with the evolution of natural disasters risk is an open question. Indeed, a large share of outstanding risk capital in...