Two data sets are used to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms' financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...

This report addresses the core components of enterprise activity, namely, the factors of production and the public infrastructure to support them. In the period just before the financial crisis, a number of elements, such as access to finance, skills and education of labor, and infrastructure...

This paper examines the impact of bank ownership on credit growth in developing countries before and during the 2008-2009 crisis. Using bank-level data for countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America, it analyzes the growth of banks' total gross loans as well as the growth of corporate,...

Many recent studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural and institutional determinants of corruption at the cross-national level. This study complements these existing cross-country studies by focusing on firm-level evidence of microeconomic factors affecting bribes paid in a single...