There is currently a large interest in understanding firms'access to finance, particularly in the financing of small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). But the financing patterns of SMEs across countries is not well understood. For example, little is known about the relative importance of...

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of micro-level field research conducted in late 1989 and early 1990 of constraints confronting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Sri Lanka and Tanzania, and to analyze the implications of these results for reforms to promote the development...

The author examines the effect of legal bonding on ownership and control structures of foreign firms cross-listing in the United States. Contrary to the predictions of corporate governance convergence theories, there is little evidence of convergence-related migration to a dispersed ownership...

Control of corporate assets by wealthy families in economies lacking institutional integrity is common. It has negative implications on corporate governance and adverse macroeconomic effects when it extends across a sufficiently large part of the country's corporate sector. The authors consider...

The authors investigate whether ownership structure significantly affects the performance of publicly listed firms in China and if so, in what way. With publicly listed stocks, one can quantify the ownership mix and concentration, which makes it possible to study this issue. The authors use the...

Using a large sample of data on mid-sized firms in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, the authors compare the performance of privatized and state firms in the environment of the postcommunist transition. They find strong evidence that private ownership--except for worker ownership--...

Using enterprise survey data for 1995-97, the author studies and compares how different modes of privatizing to insiders affect enterprise restructuring in two former Soviet republics, Georgia and Moldova. Restructuring in companies in which incumbent managers received significant ownership...

As many East Asian countries plunged into economic decline, the structure of concentrated ownership and associated corporate governance, along with weak corporate performance, have been blamed for the crisis. There is little empirical evidence, however, of the nature of ownership structures in...

Using data on more than 56,000 enterprises in 90 countries, this paper finds that objective conditions in the business environment vary substantially across firms of different sizes and that there are important non-linearities in their impact on employment growth. The paper focuses on four...

Policy makers in both developed and developing countries want to make cities more competitive, attract entreprepreneurs, boost economic growth, and promote job creation. The authors examine the spatial location of entrepreneurs in India in manufacturing and services sectors, as well as in the...