Production networks and the regional division of labor have been established in East Asia resulting in massive vertical intra-industry trade in parts and components within the region. This phenomenon is known as cross-border production sharing or the fragmentation of production processes into...

This paper seeks to analyze the factors affecting the growth of enterprises in the Philippines, as measured from the expansion of employment. The paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it attempts to provide a comprehensive background of the various policies and legislations...

We explore whether the tendency for smaller firms to have fewer hierarchical layers explains the well-documented inverse correlation between firm size and the rate at which employees become business owners. Our analysis is based on a Swedish matched employer-employee dataset. Conditional on firm...

The annually increasing firm churn has significant financial, legal and social impacts on productivity, employment and economic growth in Australia. However, evidence of the impacts of firm churn is sparse. This paper undertakes a first-ever study that empirically investigates the determinants...

This paper contributes to the international evidence on the possible factors linked to corruption using data on over 1,700 small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in 29 Philippine Cities covered by the 2009 Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Enterprise Survey. The results suggest that...

Bribes can either put "grease" or "sand" in the wheels of commerce, affecting firm performance (at the micro-level) and, ultimately, economic growth (at the macro-level). These two opposing hypotheses on the role corruption plays in countries with weak institutions raise an important empirical...

Households and businesses need to cope and thrive in an increasingly shock-prone world. Development and poverty reduction strategies need to take careful account of efforts to promote not just more resilient households and communities; but also more resilient firms on which many jobs and...

We investigate how communication within banks affects small-business lending. Using travel time between a bank's headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times to evaluate the impact of within bank communication...

This study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and the role of Fintech, in particular mobile financial services (MFS), in their recovery from COVID-induced losses. The study uses data from a survey of 216 MSMEs from Bangladesh Small...