This paper examines the effect that a country’s business regulatory environment has on the amount of foreign direct investment it attracts. We use the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business ranking to capture the costs that firms face when operating in a country. Several interesting results...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and infrastructure at both the country and regional level using the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys data. A statistically significant and considerable relationship is established between the measure of corruption in the macro data and the...

There are only a handful of studies that examine public support for the IMF and World Bank. At the individual level, evaluations of the economy feature prominently in these studies. Utilizing data from the Afrobarometer study, we find that evaluations of the economy, ideology and a range of...

This paper documents that standard measures of corruption based on the perceptions of experts and opinion surveys and measures based on the experiences of firms can in some cases lead to quite different conclusions as to how much of a problem corruption is in a country. We then show that while...

Using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, we test two interesting results that emerge from the theoretical model presented in Shleifer and Vishny (1994) that studies bargaining between politicians and managers of state-owned firms. Shleifer and Vishny's model suggests that firms with...

type="main" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Recent years have seen a significant focus in the literature on growth and development on the idea that legal and political institutions are the key determinant of economic development. The main finding of this paper is that the focus on the primacy of legal and political...</p>

We analyze the effects of corruption and institutional quality on the quality of business regulation. Our key findings indicate that corruption negatively affects the quality of regulation and that general institutional quality is insignificant once corruption is controlled for. These findings...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and infrastructure at both the country and regional level using the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys data. A statistically significant and considerable relationship is established between the measure of corruption in the macro data and the...

Are women less corrupt in business? We revisit this question using firm-level data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys, which measure firms’ experience of corruption and the gender of their owners and top managers. We find that women in positions of influence are associated with less...