Entry requires external finance, especially for less wealthy entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection limits competition. We model how incumbents lobby harder to block access to finance to entrants when politicians are less accountable to voters. In a broad cross-section of countries and...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

Can a wealth shift to emerging countries explain instability in developed countries? Investors exposed to political risk seek safety in countries with better property right protection. This induces private intermediaries to offer safety via inexpensive demandable debt, and increase lending into...

We analyze the distribution of economic activity across space for different types of activity and different levels of aggregation. Not only is this distribution highly uneven (independently of the type of activity and level of aggregation), it is also remarkably regular regarding its size...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...