Government-owned development banks have often been justified by the need to respond to financial market imperfections that hinder the establishment and growth of promising businesses, and as a result, stifle economic development more generally. However, evidence on the effectiveness of these...

This paper uses a randomized controlled experiment in Costa Rica to determine whether IB use by Banco Nacional de Desarrollo's micro and small enterprise (MSE) clients has an impact on their performance, measured in terms of productivity, increase in sales, and cost reduction. Results from the...

The paper uses microeconomic data to characterize entrepreneurs by income group and selected household, individual and business characteristics, finding that entrepreneurship is rare but more frequent in the upper class than the middle or lower classes. Middle-class entrepreneurs are, on...

This paper studies three horizontal policy instruments and two vertical ones in Chilean industrial policy, particularly regarding small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The horizontal instruments are (1) a guarantee program for borrowing by SMEs (FOGAPE), (2) a small subsidy to new exports that...

While many studies explain the correlation between firm-level productivity and export status entirely by better firms self-selecting into exporting, a few studies find evidence of reverse causation. Especially in developing or ransition economies, exporters seem to improve performance after they...

Financial frictions are a central element of most of the models that the literature on emerging markets crises has proposed for explaining the Sudden Stop phenomenon. To date, few studies have aimed to examine the quantitative implications of these models and to integrate them with an...

Based on a cross-country comparison of dynamic new firms, this paper attempts to characterize Latin American middle-class entrepreneurs and their firms. In general, Latin American middle-class entrepreneurs tend to face more difficult conditions in terms of resources and skills acquisition than...

This study attempted to identify how regional integration and spatial enlargement would affect firms’ strategic decisions from the outside of an integrated region. By analyzing data sets between 2000 and 2007 utilizing the gravity model, this study examined the specific properties of Korean...

The paper investigates how would sector composition and the magnitude of R&D investments in the EU differ in year 2020 compared to the past, if a selection of top R&D-investing SMEs were assumed to be on a fast growth track while the top R&D-investing large scale companies continued to grow as...