We study the relationship between finance and growth using a sample of 275 Chinese cities during 2009-2018. We exclude a large amount of bank loans to local governments through the local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). This allows us to construct a new and better financial development...

Brock and De Haas (2023) study the effect of randomising applicant gender in small business loan applications that are reviewed by loan officers at a Turkish bank in a lab-in-the-field experiment based on real-life applications. The main results are: first, that loan approval rates are not...

The constraint on informal finance is commonly taken to be high costs and limited supply. But the majority of informal investors - family and friends - is often willing to supply funds at negative returns, and yet many borrowers tap family and friends only as a last resort. We explain this...

Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms especially in their banking sectors that have been quite critical for both financial development and real economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant banking...