This paper estimates the survival time of nearly 7,000 firms in a dozen high-income and middle-income countries in a scenario of extreme economic distress, using the World Bank's Enterprises Surveys. Under the assumption that firms have no incoming revenues and cover only fixed costs, the median...

How many and which firms issue equity and bonds in domestic and international markets, how do these firms grow relative to non-issuing firms, and how does firm performance vary along the firm size distribution? To evaluate these questions, a new data set is constructed by matching data on...

Is it the institutions or firm characteristics at birth that shape startups and their early growth in developing countries? Using comprehensive data from the Indian Annual Survey of Industries this paper addresses this question by studying the early lifecycle of firms across diverse...

This paper uses farm panel data from China to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine investments, and the demand for machine services. Recently, China's agriculture has experienced a large expansion of machine rentals and machine services provided by specialized agents, which has...

Rapid population growth in many developing countries has raised concerns regarding food security and household welfare. To understand the consequences of population growth in a general equilibrium setting, this paper examines the dynamics of population density and its impacts on household...

This paper uses farm panel data from Indonesia to examine dynamic patterns of land use, capital investments, and wages in agriculture. The empirical analysis shows that an increase in real wages has induced the substitution of labor by machines among relatively large farmers. Large farmers tend...

Noncompliance with regulations by enterprises is said to be rife in developing countries. Yet there is limited systematic evidence of the magnitude of noncompliance at the enterprise level. Making innovative use of two complementary data sources, this paper quantifies noncompliance for India's...

Many countries in Africa suffer high rates of underemployment or low rates of productive employment; many also anticipate large numbers of people to enter the workforce in the near future. This paper asks the question: Are African firms creating fewer jobs than those located elsewhere? And, if...

Survey data from 120 developing countries are used to examine the relation between establishment size and age in the formal sector. Existing research suggests that manufacturing establishments in developing countries do not grow over time, most likely because of market imperfections and...

Two otherwise identical firms that enter the same market in different months, one in January and one in December, will report dramatically different annual sales for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations of the level...