Using a comprehensive and proprietary data set on international private equity activity, this paper studies the determinants of buyout investments across 61 countries and 19 industries over 1990-2017. The study finds evidence that macroeconomic conditions, development of stock and credit...

Using both market-based and annual report-based approaches to measure lending specialization for a broad cross-section of banks and countries over the period 2002 to 2011, this paper is the first to empirically gauge the relationship between bank lending specialization and bank performance and...

This paper introduces the Global Financial Development Database, an extensive dataset of financial system characteristics for 205 economies from 1960 to 2010. The database includes measures of (a) size of financial institutions and markets (financial depth), (b) degree to which individuals can...

This paper examines how different establishments performed during the recent global financial crisis, focusing on the role of foreign ownership. The paper investigates how foreign ownership affected establishments' responses to negative economic shocks, using a cross-country panel dataset with...

This paper uses firm-level data to assess whether telecommunication services are general-purpose technologies (technologies that benefit a large segment of the economy and have long-lasting effect). It finds that only Internet services are so: firm growth and productivity are much higher when...

This paper presents evidence on the determinants of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in services sectors. It develops a stylized model of mergers and acquisitions that predicts that the incidence of merger and acquisition deals depends, inter alia, on the target economy's size, industrial...

Since income is the return on wealth, the total wealth of any given country should be on the order of 20 times its gross domestic product. Instead the average observed ratio from the balance sheet accounts of the System of National Accounts is a factor of 2.6 to 6.6, depending on whether natural...

Paying for performance provides financial rewards to medical care providers for improvements in performance measured by specific utilization and quality of care indicators. In 2006, Rwanda began a paying for performance scheme to improve health services delivery, including HIV/AIDS services....

Many different strategies have been proposed to improve the delivery of health care services, from capacity building to establishing new payment mechanisms. Recent attention has also asked whether improvements in the way health care services are governed could make a difference. These approaches...