We conducted a three-phase study of arts participation using SPPA (Survey of Public Participation in the Arts) data going back to 1982. Using statistical methods to correct for possible survey sampling bias (including clustering, stratification, and weighting), in phase 1 we confirm previous...

In this paper, we consider the long-term effects on economic output of fiscal deficits and banking crises. Using an unbalanced panel of thousands of annual observations from 169 countries around the world, we find very limited evidence that (average) banking crises have either statistically...

We exploit the natural institutional variation in Western Europe to examine leverage (and debt maturity) for listed and non-listed companies (NLCs). We find that the legal efficiency measure (Djankov, et al, 2008) is more closely related to the amount of leverage and debt maturity than is the...

Abstract: We examine how asset structure is related to leverage in different institutional environments, using tens of thousands of firm-level observations from small, privately held, emerging market firms that are likely to face financing constraints. Our empirical analysis indicates that the...