This paper analyzes the impact of banking crises on manufacturing exports exploiting the fact that sectors differ in their needs for external financing. Relying on data from 23 banking crises episodes involving both developed and developing countries during the period 1980-2000 the authors...

This paper assesses whether there is a gender gap in the use of financial services by businesses and individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors do not find evidence of gender discrimination or lower inherent demand for financial services by enterprises with female ownership participation or...

A number of recent studies have empirically documented links between characteristics of World Bank projects and their ultimate outcomes as evaluated by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. This paper explores the in-sample and out-of-sample predictive performance of empirical models...

The differences in financial development across Indian states, while seeming substantial, have a minor effect on firm lifecycle and growth. These results hold controlling for differences in labor regulations across states, capital intensity, and for firms born before and after the major reforms....

Academics and policy makers have long considered an adequate supply of infrastructure services to be essential for economic development. This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of infrastructure development on growth and income distribution. The theoretical...

This paper finds that shareholder-friendly corporate governance is positively associated with bank insolvency risk, as proxied by the Z-score and the Merton's distance to default measure, for an international sample of banks over the 2004-08 period. Banks are special in that"good"corporate...

In recent years there has been a rapid increase in the presence and growth of greenfield microfinance institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses regressions to benchmark those African greenfields relative to other microfinance providers and finds that greenfields grew faster in terms of...

This paper uses cross-country firm-level surveys to gauge access to financial services and the importance of financing constraints for African enterprises. The paper compares access to finance in Africa and other developing regions of the world, within Africa across countries, and across...

This paper examines the association between the default risk of foreign bank subsidiaries and their parents during the global financial crisis, with the purpose of understanding what factors can help insulate affiliates from their parents. The paper finds evidence of a significant positive...

This paper analyzes the impact of introducing credit information-sharing systems on firms'access to finance. The analysis uses multi-year, firm-level surveys for 63 countries covering more than 75,000 firms over the period 2002-13. The results reveal that credit bureau reforms, but not credit...