The global financial crisis brought public guarantees to the forefront of the policy debate. Based on a review of the theoretical foundations of public guarantees, this paper concludes that the commonly used justifications for public guarantees based solely on agency frictions (such as adverse...

Under financial constraints, exporting may have less to do with productivity and more to do with financial resources. The established relationship between exporting and productivity would differ when examined through the lens of the working capital needs of the firm. The hypothesis that working...

This paper studies interactions between access to finance, product innovation, and labor supply in a two-period overlapping generations model with an endogenous skill distribution and credit market frictions. In the model lack of access to finance (induced by high monitoring costs) has an...

This paper uses data from a large survey of Chinese firms to investigate whether local government efforts to facilitate market development improve firm efficiency. Both government provision of information about products, markets, and innovation and government assistance in arranging loans are...

This note reviews recent World Bank experience with projects using results-based lending in Social Protection and Labor (SP&L) in preparation for stepped-up engagement under the proposed Program-for-Results (P4R). The P4R is expected to be launched in 2012. Given the already strong use of...

The authors of this paper claim that modeling financial markets based on probability theory is a severe systematic mistake that led to the global financial crisis. They argue that the crisis was not just the result of risk managers using outdated financial data, but that the employed efficiency...

The objective of this paper is to inform Liberia's medium-term growth and development strategy for 2012-17 and its National Vision: Liberia Rising 2030, both of which are under preparation. The analysis is based on MAMS (Maquette for MDG [Millennium Development Goal]) Simulations, a computable...

The allocation of production across firms is a potentially important explanation of the productivity gap between rich and poor economies. Reforms to trade policy and the domestic financial sector are often both key elements of policy packages aimed at reducing productive distortions. However,...

In the past decade, the World Bank has promoted improving business environments as a key strategy for development, which has resulted in a significant amount of investment in collecting firm-level investment climate surveys across countries. What lessons have emerged from the papers using these...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? This paper uses a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. The analysis...