Studies of female business leaders and economic performance are rarely conducted with worldwide observational data, and with considerations on the underlying cultural, institutional, and business environment. This paper uses worldwide, firm-level data from more than 100 countries to study how...

Using multiple sources of national- and firm-level data around the world, this paper investigates how the effects of the business environment depend on whether themeasure is de jure or de facto, and how business environment effects differ by ownership and size. The paper compares estimates of...

A void in the literature on the business environment is how it evolves over time. Focusing on China during its crucial two decades of transition (from the early 1990s to the early 2010s), this paper documents how the country's business environment and the characteristics of entrepreneurs...

Many recent studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural and institutional determinants of corruption at the cross-national level. This study complements these existing cross-country studies by focusing on firm-level evidence of microeconomic factors affecting bribes paid in a single...

This paper explores the links between city competitiveness and air pollution and the business environment. Because competitive cities not only attract more productive firms, but also facilitate their business, the paper look at firm performance as a proxy for city competitiveness. It focuses on...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the role of factional competition and local accountability in explaining the enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development performance in Fujian province of China. When the Communist armies took over Fujian from the...