The authors study firm dynamics using a novel database of all formally registered firms in Cote d'Ivoire from 1977 to 1997, which account for about 60 percent of gross domestic product. First, they examine entry and exit patterns and the role of new and exiting firms versus incumbents in job...

Over the past two decades, more than half the population in rural Tanzania migrated within the country, profoundly changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing. Mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks, on which the authors collected...

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 studies the relationship between inequality of opportunity and development outcomes in a cross-country setting. Scholars have long debated the impact of inequality on growth, development, and the quality of institutions in a society. The empirical relationships are however confounded...

This paper examines whether natural resource dependence has a negative influence on various indicators of institutional quality when controlling for the potential effects of other geographic, economic and cultural initial conditions. Analysis of a panel of countries from 1996 to 2010 indicates...

This paper looks into institutional and other macro determinants of prevalence of informal dependent employment, as well as informal self-employment, in European countries, using European Social Survey data on work without legal contract in on 30 countries, covering years 2004-2009. Consistently...

This paper investigates the impact of institutional quality on public investment levels over the period 1984-2008. Moreover, it studies how the volatility of public investment and the quality of infrastructure are affected by institutional quality, and explores the contribution of other critical...