This paper discusses Islamic banking products and interprets them in the context of financial intermediation theory. Anecdotal evidence shows that many of the conventional products can be redrafted as Sharia-compliant products, so that the differences are smaller than expected. Comparing...

Using a novel enterprise survey from Kenya (FinAccess Business), we document a strong positive association between the use of mobile money as a method to pay suppliers and access to trade credit. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, imperfect credit...

We use a novel enterprise survey from Tanzania to gauge the relationship between saving instruments and entrepreneurial reinvestment. While most informal savings practices do not imply a lower likelihood of entrepreneurial reinvestment when compared with formal savings practices, we find a...

This paper discusses Islamic banking products and interprets them in the context of financial intermediation theory. Anecdotal evidence shows that many of the conventional products can be redrafted as Sharia-compliant products, so that the differences are smaller than expected. Comparing...

Does financial development translate into a comparative advantage in industries that use more external finance? The author uses industry-level data on firms' dependence on external finance for 36 industries and 56 countries to examine this question. It is shown that countries with...

This article introduces a large new cross-country database, the database of political institutions. It covers 177 countries over 21 years, 1975-95. The article presents the intuition, construction, and definitions of the different variables. Among the novel variables introduced are several...