We provide a comprehensive review of firms' financing channels (internal and external, domestic and international) around the globe, with the focus on alternative finance — financing from all the non-market, non-bank external sources. We argue that while traditional financing channels,...

The “legal origins” scholarship of the past decade has created controversy both in its application of quantitative methods to comparative law and in its claims that common law is better than civil law for economic development. These controversies have unleashed a storm of criticism by...

This paper reports on the latest update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2007: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism,...

Finance has become more a problem than a solution to what the world most wants: socially inclusive growth. It has become a source of crises that threaten the development of the real economy. It has escaped accountability to democratic institutions and often helped, instead, to influence and...

We explore conditions under which collaboration between pharmaceutical firms from 'advanced' and emerging countries becomes preferable to rivalry. We show that that when agreements, such as Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (IP) Rights, allow advanced country firms to take legal...

The response to the trafficking of women is primarily dominated by the discourse of criminal law both internationally and nationally. By contrast, in the refugee law context, women are constructed as victims in a ‘culturally relative', patriarchal society. This paper explores the tensions...

The authors report on the latest version of the worldwide governance indicators, covering 213 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance from 1996 until end-2005: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory...

Modularity is often cited as one of the foundations for the Internet’s success. Unfortunately, academic discussions about modularity appearing in the literature on Internet policy are undertheorized. The persistence of nonmodular architectures for some technologies underscores the need for...

Six new aggregate measures capturing various dimensions of governance provide new evidence of a strong causal relationship from better governance to better development outcomes. In a cross-section of more than 150 countries, Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton provide new empirical evidence of a...