Dynastic management is the inter-generational transmission of control over assets that is typical of family-owned firms. It is pervasive around the World, but especially in developing countries. We argue that dynastic management is a potential source of inefficiency: if the heir to the family...

How malleable are preferences? This paper provides experimental evidence on the extent to which insurance sellers can influence buyers and whether mandatory information disclosure offsets these effects. The experiment involves 214 subjects seeking or recently obtaining unsecured loans and 25...

We generate an original dataset on bribe payments at two competing ports in Southern Africa that allows us to take an unusually close look at the relationship between bureaucratic organization, bribe-setting behavior and the costs corruption imposes on users of public services. We find that the...

The stock market capitalization (SMC) of a country, defined as the aggregated market value equity of companies in the respective equity market, is commonly used to measure the widening and deepening of stock market activity. SMC also influences economic growth predictions and public consensus...

Previous empirical studies of international CAPM models have not found much supporting evidence. In this paper we suggest reasons why this might have happened and perform new tests using improved models and data. A range of monthly CAPM models are estimated for 1973-1987 for aggregate equities...

Dynastic management is the inter-generational transmission of control over assets that is typical of family-owned firms. It is pervasive around the world, but especially in developing countries. We argue that dynastic management is a potential source of inefficiency: if the heir to the family...

In this paper we distinguish different “qualities” of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. We use ‘quality’ to mean the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth. However this is difficult to establish because it is a function of many different country and project...

We use a new firm level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries—close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge from the data. Most foreign direct investment (FDI) occurs between rich...

The standard New Keynesian model suffers from the so-called .macro-micro pricing conflict: in order to match the dynamics of inflation implied by macroeconomic data, the model needs to assume an average duration of price contracts which is much longer than what is observed in micro data. Here I...

We explore the relation between international financial integration and the level of entrepreneurial activity in a country. Using a unique data set of approximately 24 million firms in nearly 100 countries in 1999 and 2004, we find suggestive evidence that international financial integration has...