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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 18, 2023
The Lancet Investing in Health Commission, led by Larry Summers and Dean Jamison in 2013, envisioned a grand convergence in key health indicators by 2035 between low-income and low-middle-income countries and the best-performing middle-income countries. Given significant global changes since the rep...
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 30, 2023
Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and tackling the climate crisis in developing nations demands substantial investments. A recent report commissioned by the G20 estimated that for developing countries (encompassing low-income, lower-middle-income, and upper-middle-income nations), a...
Blog Post
October 25, 2023
A couple of years ago I joked that many development economics papers could be summarized by simply saying “schools: they’re good!”—or as an economist might put it, “the returns to education are positive.” Papers documenting the benefits of education have been at the core of development economics for...
Blog Post
October 12, 2023
The vast majority of out-of-school children around the world live in rural areas. For children who live in rural areas and who are enrolled in school, they are less likely to finish primary school or to transition to secondary school. They score worse on tests. Less educational attainment and lower ...
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...