State-controlled listed firms in China receive preferential treatment when borrowing from commercial banks; in contrast, private controlled firms rely on informal finance and on trade credit. We argue for and find evidence that private firms located in higher social trust regions use more trade...

Lending to the poor is expensive due to high screening, monitoring, and enforcement costs. Group lending advocates believe lenders overcome this by harnessing social connections. Using data from FINCA-Peru, I exploit a quasi-random group formation process to find evidence of peers successfully...

This introductory chapter summarises the diversity of perspectives from a group of academicians, practitioners and contributors and their knowledge of, and/or experience of, corruption in the Asia Pacific Region. Hand in hand, the theoreticians inform, while the practitioners enlighten; this...

This paper argues that firm finance is something of a 'black-box' in economic geography, a largely take-for-granted aspect of production. Focusing on small firms, the paper argues that firm finance warrants analysis, not simply to 'add' to knowledge and to form another sub-discipline of economic...

A critical element of word of mouth (WOM) or buzz marketing is to identify seeds, often central actors with high degree in the social network. Seed identification typically requires data on the full network structure, which is often unavailable. We therefore examine the impact of WOM seeding...

Can improved access to credit jump-start microenterprise growth? We examine subjects in urban Hyderabad, India, six years after microfinance–an intervention commonly believed to lower the cost of credit and spark business creation–was randomly introduced to a subset of neighborhoods. We find...

We study the economic structure of the life of Harry Potter and his co-actors as an economic model that governs the social organization of their economic activities. Our goal is to study and understand the internal consistency of the Potterian economic model and explore the relationships between...

Some have predicted that the next ‘Big N' international firm could be a Chinese CPA firm. Our primary research motivation has been to explore how far this view is shared and whether it is realistic to suppose that one or more Chinese firms, however large they may grow domestically, or even as...

Micro-finance programs provide poor people with small loans given to jointly liable self-selected groups. Follow-up loans provide incentives to repay. We experimentally investigate the influence of those features on strategic default. Each group member invests in an individual risky project,...

We examine the relationship between trust and financial development using detailed regional data in Turkey. We distinguish different forms of trust (i.e., generalized, narrow, and wide) and investigate whether varying degrees of generalized and narrow trust, as well as wide and narrow trust...