Tax evasion, by its very nature, is difficult to observe. We quantify the effects of tax rates on tax evasion by examining the relationship in China between the tariff schedule and the quot;evasion gap,quot; which we define as the difference between Hong Kong's reported exports to China at the...

Recent work suggests that financial development is important for economic growth, since financial markets more effectively allocate capital to firms with high value projects. For firms in poorly developed financial markets, implicit borrowing in the form of trade credit may provide an...

Fisman and Love reexamine the role of financial market development in the intersectoral allocation of resources. First, they characterize the assumptions underlying previous work in this area, in particular, that of Rajan and Zingales (1998). Theauthors argue that Rajan and Zingales (1998)...

Where do firms turn for financing in countries with poorly developed financial markets? One source is trade credit. And where formal financial intermediaries are deficient, industries that rely more on this source of financing grow faster.Recent empirical work has shown that financial...

In this note, we revisit an earlier, highly influential paper on Financial Dependence and Growth by Rajan and Zingales (1998), by re-examining their assumptions, and the robustness of their results to alternative theories and interpretations. We first show that they may be implicitly testing...

We document the under-pricing of state asset sales in China. Because these stakes were in partially privatized firms, there is a credible benchmark - the price of publicly traded shares - to measure the extent of under-pricing. On average, we find that blocks of government shares sell at a...

One of the alleged benefits of the recent global movement to strengthen intellectual property rights (IPRs) is that such reforms accelerate transfers of technology between countries. Branstetter, Fisman, and Foley examine how technology transfer among U.S. multinational firms changes in response...

Economic thought has in recent years increasingly departed from the paradigm of narrow self-interestedness to take up other-regarding preferences. We study one class of such preferences - individual preferences for giving. We use graphical representations of modified Dictator Games that vary the...

Shareholder delegation of the power to fire the CEO to the board of directors is central to corporate governance. While the board ideally acts as desired by shareholders, board entrenchment may insulate a poorly performing manager from shareholders agitating for her removal. The conventional...

A defining characteristic of developing countries is the inadequacy of basic services normally required to support organized economic activity. One way in which the private sector acts to facilitate development is through investments orchestrated by agglomerations of firms called business...