Firms often cite financing constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Global capital flows, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease the financing constraints of host country firms. But if incoming foreign investors borrow heavily from domestic banks, foreign direct investment...

Recent empirical work has shown that financial development is important for economic growth, since well-developed financial markets are more effective at allocating capital to firms with high-value projects. This raises the question of whether firms with high return projects in countries with...

The authors combine the agency theory of the firm with risk diversification incentives for insiders. Principal-agent problems between insiders and outsiders force insiders to retain a larger share in their firm than they would under a perfect risk diversification strategy. The authors predict...

The relationship between the financial, and real sides of the economy has long been a topic of intense interest, and debate. The author provides microeconomic evidence that financial development aids growth, by reducing financing constraints that would otherwise restrict efficient firm...

The authors study the effect of financial crises on trade credit in a sample of 890 firms in six emerging economies. They find that although provision of trade credit increases right after the crisis, it consequently collapses in the following months and years. The authors observe that firms...

Combining multi-year, firm-level surveys with country-level panel data for 53 countries, the authors explore the impact of bank competition on firms'access to finance. They find that low competition, as measured by high values of the Lerner index, diminishes firms'access to finance, while...

The authors analyze the relationship between financial development and inter-industry resource allocation in the short and long run. They suggest that in the long run, economies with high rates of financial development will devote relatively more resources to industries with a"natural"reliance...

The authors 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). The authors argue that Rajan and Zingales (1998)...

This paper uses new panel data on the number of new firm registrations in 109 countries during 2002-2012 to study the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth. The data show strong evidence of a pro-cyclical pattern in entrepreneurship. An examination of heterogeneous...

The authors combine firm-level data from the World Bank Business Environment Survey (WBES) with data on private and public credit registries to investigate whether the presence of a credit registry in a country is associated with lower financing constraints, as perceived by managers, and with...