This article analyses the growth of microfinance by examining how some driven forces heighten more or less their financial integration. Three main driven forces identify: agency costs, financial development and trade-off in microfinance. The author samples 542 microfinance institutions. Quantile...

A large body of evidence suggests that poor countries tend to invest less (have lower PPP - adjusted investment rates) and to face higher relative prices of investment goods. It has been suggested that this happens either because these countries have lower TFP in the investment - good producing...

We study a broad sample of firms across 32 countries and find that strong shareholder protections and better access to stock market financing lead to substantially higher long-run rates of R&D investment, particularly in small firms, but are unimportant for fixed capital investment. Credit...

Since the 1970’s, countries of the Sub-Saharan African region have experienced slow economic growth and development in comparison to other regions of the world. This paper studies the role of perceived financial risk in explaining the divergence of economic growth among Sub-Saharan African...

This article constructs triple-difference tests around shifts in the supply of risk management instruments available to agricultural producers to reveal a positive relation between risk management and productivity. This relation is more robust when producers adopt instruments with payoffs linked...

This paper builds a dataset on bank ownership that covers more than 6,500 banks in 181 countries (59 low-income economies, 72 middle-income economies, and 50 high-income economies) over 1995-2020. I show that until 2010, there was a reduction in state-ownership of banks and an increase foreign...

Transition has entailed the introduction of policies to stimulate product market competition, to establish effective corporate governance and to harden enterprise budget constraints. How do these policies interact; Are they substitute policy instruments or does one policy reinforce the effect of...

Can policymakers improve macroeconomic performance by encouraging the entry of high-performance startups? To answer this question, we construct a novel and comprehensive data set on 1.3 million startups in ten European countries. We apply cluster analysis to identify distinct startup types and...