With few exceptions, mainly in Asia, mutual funds grew explosively in most countries around the world during the 1990s. Equity funds predominated in Anglo-American countries while bond funds predominated in most of Continental Europe, and in middle-income countries. Capital market development...

This paper evaluates how microfinance performed in providing business financing in 27 Sub-Saharan African countries. It uses data from the 2009 and 2010 Gallup World Poll, a nationally-representative survey of at least 1,000 individuals per country, conducted in up to 157 countries per year. The...

The authors study the relationship between ownership structure, corporate governance, and the initial public offering (IPO) process. They examine equity ownership by different institutions, such as foreign and domestic financial institutions, banks with and without lending relationships, venture...

Around the world, factoring is a growing source of external financing for corporations and small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). What is unique about factoring is that the credit provided by a lender is explicitly linked to the value of a supplier's accounts receivable and not the supplier's...

The authors test competing theories of capital structure choices using firm-level data on firm borrowings. The majority of firms in the dataset are privately owned, young, micro or small and medium enterprise (SME) firms concentrated in the service sector. In general, the financing pattern of...

The authors examine the relationship between foreign investment and the attributes of emerging market countries and firms in which investment is made. Their findings indicate that countries with higher levels of economic development and floating exchange rate regimes tend to have greater ability...

Factoring is a form of asset-based finance where the credit is extended based on the value of the borrower's accounts receivable. In recent years factoring has experienced phenomenal growth and has become an important source of financing-especially short-term working capital-for small and...

The authors jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. They argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model."Nonrobustness"checks (which purposely exclude some...

The widespread financial crisis in East Asia caused large economic shocks, which varied by degree across the region. That crisis provides a unique opportunity for investigating the factors that determine the use of bankruptcy processes in a number of economies. The authors study the use of...

The authors investigate whether firms'access to external financing, to fund growth differs between market-based, and bank-based financial systems. Using firm-level data for forty countries, they compute the proportion of firms in each country that relies on external finance, and examine how that...