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WORKING PAPERS
April 04, 2024
Star firms, defined as the top 10 percentile of firms in the world in terms of return on invested capital, are more likely to occur in high-income countries and manufacturing industry, but there is an increasing share of star firms from middle-income countries and the services sector. Star firms hav...
Blog Post
April 04, 2024
A large academic and policy debate has focused on the increase in market concentration over the past few decades which has given rise to “star firms,” a small set of firms that generate abnormal returns for their investors. A common concern is that these firms exert excess market power and behave as...
Blog Post
December 15, 2023
The poster at the back of the fourth grade classroom asked, “what is your dream?” On cutout paper clouds students had written “doctor”, “teacher”, “football star”, but one in particular caught my attention, “to build a house for my mother.” My throat choked, imagining how precarious this child’s hom...
Blog Post
December 14, 2023
The low quality of health care services has become a primary concern globally and for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that have made bold commitments to progress toward universal health coverage. Despite improvements, an estimated five million deaths could be averted globally through better...
Blog Post
December 06, 2023
Men are the majority customers in bank lending portfolios throughout the world. The gender gap in access to credit is larger in developing countries and especially onerous for women entrepreneurs who suffered disproportionate employment and income losses during the recent COVID pandemic. What drives...
Blog Post
November 09, 2023
There are so many studies regarding so many aspects of development economics that it can be difficult to keep up. Last week was the North East Universities Development Consortium annual conference, often called NEUDC. Researchers presented more than 130 papers across a wide range of topics, from agr...
Blog Post
October 05, 2023
A year ago, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that an alarming 60 percent of developing countries and 25 percent of emerging market economies were either in debt distress or at severe risk of default. The confluence of severe shocks in the period 2020-22, starting with the COVID-19 pan...
WORKING PAPERS
October 05, 2023
This paper uses a straightforward Resilience Indicator, constructed from a small set of economic and institutional variables, to show that by 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global shocks, it was possible to identify emerging markets and developing countries that would encounter ...
Blog Post
September 22, 2023
We’ve updated our 2022 working paper with Laura Moscoviz on long run trends in education quality with several new surveys from around the world. Notably, a new survey round for India (NFHS-5) casts doubt on earlier data (NFHS-3). Dropping the suspect data, India’s current learning levels are unchang...
WORKING PAPERS
September 22, 2023
Using new data from the European Banking Authority on loan recovery outcomes, we examine how variation in loan recovery efficiency affects the transmission of financial sector and overall economic weakness to firm-level financial and real outcomes. We find that firms linked to under-capitalized bank...