We use a unique firm-level survey database compiled by the World Bank to examine the drivers of discouraged small businesses in various developing economies around the world. We confirm that older and larger firms are less likely to be discouraged and that the level of competition and the...

We investigate whether busy boards add more value to standalone firms compared to business group affiliated firms in India – an economy plagued with significant institutional voids. Using board composition data of the top 500 Indian firms spanning the period 2003 to 2006, we find that firm...

This paper proposes a novel application of text categorization for two types questions asked in a micro-blogging supported classroom, namely relevant and irrelevant questions. Empirical results and analysis show that utilizing the correlation between questions and available lecture materials in...

We address two important themes associated with institutions’ trading in foreignmarkets: (1) the choice of trading venues (between a company’s listing in its home market and that in theUnited States as anAmerican Depositary Receipt [ADR]) and (2) the comparison of trading costs across the...

"We develop a multistage model of the loan granting process to understand the contradictory findings of the existing literature on bank-borrower relationships, credit availability, and loan rates. Upon estimating our model with the 1993, 1998, and 2003 versions of the Survey of Small Business...

WWe use multilevel analysis to examine the effect of different types of subsidized funding (private vs. public) on microfinance institutions’ (MFIs) borrower repayment rates. Using information from Mixmarket data on 947 MFIs over a 10-year period (2000-2010) we find that private funding is...

We use controlled experiments to identify the proximal causes of gender differences in the repayment of microcredit. We recruit male and female subjects from a patriarchal and a matrilineal community in Bangladesh, who live in the same villages, and find that the female subjects have a greater...

We reexamine the role of relationships in the loan granting process overall. A practical implication emerging from the classical studies on the role of relationships in credit rationing is that good relationships between a borrower and his lender should, in fact, work to lower the interest rate...

In this paper we propose that hedge funds’ capacity constraints may play a significant role on the decision of fund families to open a new hedge fund. We argue that hedge fund families face diseconomies of scale because of the non-scalability of their investment strategies and, as their...

We examine the role of lender-entrepreneur relationships on the lending decision of microfinance institutions. Using primary data from Bangladesh, we show that the likelihood of being approved for microcredit increases in the magnitude of relationship driven information, and decreases in the...