This paper provides new evidence on how access to finance impacts technological innovation and establishes the role of labor practices in shaping the finance-innovation nexus. We exploit antebellum America, a unique setting where staggered adoption of free banking laws across states encouraged...

We analyze the debt origination process in which a lender offers prospective borrowers a microcredit product alongside a traditional bank loan, and the impact anti-usury mandates can cause within this credit market. This is a paper about the prospects of financial liberalization following a more...

This paper gauges the effect of financial deepening and bank outreach on informality using micro data from the Indian manufacturing sector and exploiting cross-industry variation in the need for external finance. We distinguish between two channels through which access to finance can reduce...

Uzbekistan set an ambitious goal to achieve the status of an upper-middle-income country by 2030, with the focus on growing a large and solid middle-class social stratum. The current reforms in Uzbekistan largely target the development of small businesses and private entrepreneurship (SME) as...

Guarantee banks backed by the state aim to close the gap in the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises or start-ups caused by lacking collateral or equity and high information asymmetry. The present study quantifies the economic and fiscal net benefits of guarantee banks in the new...

This study takes stock of the challenges faced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the CAREC landlocked economies in terms of their access to finance resulting from demand-side, supply-side and institutional constraints. This includes identifying cultural, procedural, institutional...

The paper discusses state, regulative framework, and recent developments in leveraging access to finance for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the Kyrgyz Republic through global value chain (GVC) examples in the Kyrgyz Republic. Access to finance in the Kyrgyz Republic is...

We assess the relationship between finance and growth over the period 1980-2014. We estimate a cross-country growth regression for 48 countries during 20 periods of 15 years starting in 1980 (to 1995) and ending in 1999 (to 2014). We use OLS and IV estimations and we find that: 1) overall...

In this study, using a unique firm-level survey database, I investigate which firm constraints in the business environment directly affect growth for over 15,000 mostly small- and medium-sized firms in 30 Eastern European and Central Asian countries. I also examine how financing constraints...

Using municipal cities during China’s reform era as the setting, we investigate how different aspects of financial development affect resource misallocation in an integrated framework. Using different identification strategies, we find that local government-driven finance exacerbates the...