This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

This paper examines the extent to which differences in legal tradition, judicial efficiency, and investor protection affect debt financing and risk taking across developing economies. We find that firms in common law countries have the highest preference for debt financing while corporations in...

This paper analyses the ownership structure of publicly listed corporations in seventeen Small Island Developing States. The paper identifies the ultimate controlling shareholders of these firms, the identity of these shareholders, whether or not ultimate shareholders are involved in management...

While finance is a critical input to the innovative process, it is often difficult to obtain, particularly in developing economies with less well-developed financial markets. As innovation is a central driver of growth, it is therefore important for policymakers to understand how different...

We study business uncertainty in high- versus low-volatility environments by surveying over 31,000 managers across 41 countries. We elicit subjective probability distributions for future own-firm sales and measure firm-level uncertainty with their mean absolute deviations. Analogously, we...

This paper reviews the obstacles for an appropriate financial architecture of new economy firms in developing countries by reviewing the theoretical and some preliminary empirical underpinnings of the importance of legal and institutional barriers. Apart from the more conventional institutional...

The industrial organization of developing countries is characterized by the pervasive use of subcontracting arrangements among small, financially constrained firms. This paper asks whether vertical integration relaxes those financial constraints. It shows that vertical integration trades off the...