Low-income households spend a substantial share of their income on utility services such as electricity, heating and water. The difficulty these socially vulnerable consumers have in affording further tariff increases is often used as an argument against tariff reform. However, detailed...

This paper studies the determinants and consequences of equity ownership in multinational affiliates. We construct a multi-period model of foreign direct investment with incomplete contracts and uncertainty to analyse the size of equity stakes. The productivity of a multinational parent and its...

We use a growth diagnostic approach to analyse the main impediments to investment and growth in Serbia. We look at a wide set of quantitative and qualitative indicators to understand if businesses are constrained by access to finance or if they forgo investment opportunities because they cannot...

The paper studies the extent of corporate leverage and range of excessive debt of Slovenian firms during the recent financial crisis. Half of all firms (of those with some non-zero debt and at least one employee) are found to face an unsustainable debt-to-EBITDA leverage ratio beyond 4,...

In this study, we consider how gift-exchange and bonus systems function in a natural field setting by measuring the effort response of participants to non-monetary gifts over time. Our field experiment tests the difference in effort response to unconditional gifts delivered immediately, promised...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...

This paper uses monthly data to examine the links between consumer confidence and real economic variables in Croatia, and it tests whether movements in the former contain predictive power for the latter. The results suggest that changes in consumer confidence help to explain retail turnover and...

We use a new dataset of de jure measures of trade, capital account, product market and domestic financial regulation for 91 countries from 1973 to 2005 to test Rajan and Zingales’s (2003) interest group theory of financial development. In line with the theory, we find strong evidence that...

This study is the first to explore the short-run impact of armed conflict on firms’ performance and their perceptions of the business environment. We focus on the August 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia and use the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey data before and...

The success of an economy depends largely on how successful it is in allocating inputs and outputs across businesses efficiently with minimum disruption and frictions. Market institutions that impact this allocation potentially account for productivity differences across countries. Existing...