This paper takes both a conceptual and an empirical approach to answer the question as to how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can be connected to the company's role as an agent of social value creation when it operates within an imperfect institutional framework of market competition. To...

This paper takes both a conceptual and an empirical approach to answer the question of how CSR can be connected to the company’s role as an agent of social value creation that operates within an imperfect institutional framework of market competition. To develop a functional design for an...

I examine the relation between bureaucratic corruption ('to get things done') and firm performance in Central and Eastern European countries. While previous research relies on data from the BEEPS survey, which suffers from excessive non-reporting of corporate performance, I combine the...

This paper investigates the effect of conflicts on firms' output value and input misallocation in the context of Palestine during the Second Intifada. Using a unique establishment-level dataset, we firms' outcomes and input usage over time across districts experiencing differential changes in...

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and...

This paper employs survey data from 110,398 firms in 108 developing countries to determine the firm and country characteristics that affect the probability that a firm is energy poor, i.e., the firm will report that electricity is an obstacle to the firm's operations. We find that firms that...

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is a policy that aims to empower black people and, thus, decrease racial inequality in South Africa. The program puts reformation pressure on firms and might strongly influence firm performance. This paper examines how BEE affects turnover, profits, and labor...

We organized business associations for the owner-managers of young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,820 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a “no-meetings” control group. We find the...

Millions of nanostores serve bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers in emerging markets. Their suppliers, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, struggle with high operational costs that largely stem from shopkeepers’ liquidity constraints. We empirically investigate whether suppliers can improve...

We study the effect of conflict on firms’ economic performance and explore the underlying mechanisms. Combining an original retrospective panel dataset of Libyan firms with geolocalized data on conflict events, we build a firm-specific measure of conflict exposure and use its within-firm...