We examine empirically how legal origin, creditor rights, property rights, legal formalism, and financial development affect the design of price and non-price terms of bank loans in almost 60 countries. Our results support the law and finance view that private contracts reflect differences in...

With extensive country- and firm-level data sets we first document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We also find that population density appears to be considerably more important...

The conventional wisdom up until the crisis was that efficient financial systems required privately owned banks and financial institutions. The events since 2007 have shown that financial systems such as China's, where banks are government owned but are also publicly listed can have a...

We provide a comprehensive review of China's financial system, and explore directions of future development. First, the financial system has been dominated by a large banking sector. In recent years banks have made considerable progress in reducing the amount of non-performing loans and...

We provide a comprehensive review of firms' financing channels (internal and external, domestic and international) around the globe, with the focus on alternative finance — financing from all the non-market, non-bank external sources. We argue that while traditional financing channels,...

With extensive cross-country datasets and India firm samples, as well as our own surveys of small and medium firms, we examine the legal and business environments, financing channels, and growth patterns of different types of firms in India. Despite the English common-law origin and a...

The spectacular economic growth in China in the past four decades has inspired a large strand of research to understand China's unconventional growth path. This paper focuses on the recent development of China's institutions, financial markets, innovations and government-business relations in...

In this paper we examine and compare the formal systems of law and finance in China and India and the alternative institutional arrangements and governing mechanisms in the two countries, and the relation between the development of these systems and their economic growth. China differs from most...

The extraordinary performance of China and India's economies raises questions about the traditional measures of the size and depth of financial systems. While banks and markets have played a limited role in providing funds for corporate sectors and supporting economic growth in these two...

We examine the role of China's financial system in supporting economic growth, and explore directions of future development. First, the current financial system is dominated by a large but inefficient banking sector. Reducing the amount of non-performing loans among the major banks to normal...