Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is built on a fundamentally different paradigm: rather than having to trust individuals and institutions, participants in DeFi potentially only have to trust computer code that is enforced by a decentralized network of computers. We examine a natural experiment that...

We look at liquidity constraints and the financing of household investment in fixed assets. We find that rural households in our sample, especially the poor, seem to face liquidity constraints. The constraints are partially mitigated by kinship networks in the village. When we further analyze...

We use and modify the rigorous standards of corporate financial accounting to create the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows for households in developing countries. The purpose is to better measure productivity, risk, financing, and portfolio management in an analysis of...

This paper uses civil conflicts in Southeast Asia to illustrate the economic causes and consequences of the conflicts on the economy. It argues that the causes of conflicts in this region are consistent with what predicted by theories that link economic growth and inequality to the motives and...

State owned enterprises (SOEs) are a pervasive form of firms across most economies in Southeast Asia. Their historical origin, development, and performance are diverse but reflects political and economic development in each country. Conforming with predictions from economic literature, SOEs in...

This paper provides a theory-based empirical framework for understanding the risk and return on productive capital assets and their allocation across activities in an economy characterized by idiosyncratic and aggregate risk and thin formal markets for real and financial assets. We apply our...

We present a vision for improving household financial surveys by integrating responses from questionnaires more completely with financial statements and combining them with payments data from diaries. Integrated household financial accounts—-balance sheet, income statement, and statement of...

The choice of organization structure between business group and conglomerate depends on the cost of ownership and the cost of market contracting. The advantages of business groups come from its flexibility in ownership compositions and the limited liability of member firms in the event of...

This paper utilizes a unique dataset of 500 firms in ten Cambodian provinces and a natural experiment to test a long-held convention in political economy that the predictability of a corruption is at least as important for firm investment decisions as the amount of bribes a firm must pay,...

Lobbying dominates corporate political spending, but comprehensive studies of the benefits accrued are scarce. Using a dataset of all US firms with publicly available financial statements, we delve into the tax benefits obtained from lobbying. Firms that spend more on lobbying in a given year...