This paper investigates whether resident enterprise managers have an informational advantage about the countries where they work. We test this informational advantage hypothesis by using a unique dataset, the Global Competitiveness Survey. The findings suggest that local managers do have...

Markets have had limited success predicting crises and might do better by drawing on private information available to resident enterprise managers, who seem to know better than markets about future movements in exchange rates.Kaufmann, Mehrez, and Schmukler investigate whether resident...

Poor governance can affect greatly public service delivery, both directly through higher price, and indirectly through lower quality or quantity available. When seeking a public service, users may be required to pay in bribes significantly more than the official price. Consequently, some users...

Lack of transparency increases the probability of a banking crisis following financial liberalization. In a country where government policy is not transparent, banks may tend to increase credit above the optimal level.Mehrez and Kaufmann investigate how transparency affects the probability of a...

In a general equilibrium in which bribe-extracting bureaucrats can endogenously choose regulatory burden and delay, the effective (not just nominal) red tape and bribery can be positively correlated across firms. Using data from three worldwide firm surveys, this paper finds evidence consistent...

The Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s not only highlighted the welfare consequences of transparency in the financial sector but also linked this relatively narrow problem to the broader context of transparency in governance. It has been observed that objections to transparency, often on...

Is it true that bribery can alleviate red tape for enterprises? Not if bureaucrats can choose the regulatory burden and the red tape delay to extract bribes. The authors' empirical test finds that firms using bribes waste more management time dealing with bureaucrats. The business community can...