This study examines the major constraints of rural business entry and performance in Yemen. The Yemen rural investment climate survey made it possible to analyze rural investment climate constraints for rural businesses. The survey was used to investigate both farm and nonfarm rural enterprises....

Recent global initiatives on debt relief and development assistance call for increasing aid for trade to the poorest countries. The paper applies a multi-country computable general equilibrium model to measure the effectiveness of alternative aid for trade categories. The findings show that aid...

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that...

Using a unique dataset that merges bankruptcy and motor events with personal data in Singapore, this study finds significant evidence of gender gap in personal bankruptcy risk. We show that the women' odds in bankruptcy events is 28% of the men's odds controlling for demographic, housing types...

We examine how ownership by couples affects risk taking in family firms. We find that firms co-owned by couples exhibit significantly lower stock return volatility. This result is robust to a difference-in-differences approach based on a smaller sample and an instrumental variable approach....

This study examines the reaction of firms to economic policy uncertainty (EPU) by investing in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using a Chinese sample, we find a positive and significant relationship between EPU and the CSR engagement of firms. Moreover, we find that firms without...

Inspired by the recent health science findings that air pollution affects mental health and cognition, we examine whether air pollution can intensify the cognitive bias observed in the financial markets. Based on a proprietary data set obtained from a large Chinese mutual fund family consisting...

This study assesses a new mechanism – the deposit channel – in the transmission of interest rate shock to household consumption using an administrative panel dataset of financial transactions for Turkey. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in consumer's adherence to the Muslim laws...

Using a comprehensive sample of credit card data from a leading Chinese bank, we find that government bureaucrats receive 16% higher credit lines than non-bureaucrats with similar income and demographics, but their accounts experience a significantly higher likelihood of delinquency and debt...

Working at home benefits workers with low fixed costs and the ability to engage in joint market and household production. We evaluate a large-scale reform in Singapore that allows the possibility of business creation at one's residential property and study whether the option of home-based...