Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural experiment, the stationing of thousands of diplomats...

We use cross-sectional data from 93 countries to study the relationship between how much redistribution citizens of different socioeconomic status want and how much the government actually redistributes. We focus on redistribution because it is an outcome for which there is a natural class...

Traditional explanations for indirect trade carried out through an entrepocirc;t have focused on savings in transport costs and on the role of specialized agents in processing and distribution. We provide an alternative perspective based on the possibility that entrepocirc;ts may facilitate tariff...

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...

We document the market response to an unexpected announcement of proposed sales of government-owned shares in China. In contrast to the quot;privatization premiumquot; found in earlier work, we find a negative effect of government ownership on returns at the announcement date and a symmetric...

We empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. We thus generate a measure of illicit trafficking in these goods based on the difference between imports recorded in United...