High-cost debt and perceived creditworthiness: Evidence from the UK
Journal of Financial Economics, 142 (2), 719-736
Cleansing by Tight Credit: Rational Cycles and Endogenous Lending Standards
Endogenous cycles are generated by the two-way interaction between lenders’ behavior in the credit market and production fundamentals. When lenders...
The new global tax deal arrives (but expect bumps ahead)
Nearly 140 countries have agreed to a new global tax deal, which was years in the making. Estonia, Hungary and Ireland, the last holdouts, joined the...
Simpler approaches to a global tax plan
More than 130 countries have lined up in favour of a global redesign of corporate taxes. The redesign calls for multinational giants to pay their...
Changing bankruptcy law has given firms time to adapt and recover
Bankruptcies are costly, but economists worry about keeping doomed firms alive. Simeon Djankov (LSE) argues that restructuring bankruptcy laws has...
Gendered laws curb Olympic success
Legal gender equality is key for female participation in the labour market. The association between women’s legal empowerment and success in sports is...
When Zombie Firms Become a Worry, Revise Bankruptcy Laws
Bankruptcies have fallen sharply in OECD economies during 2020 and the first half of 2021 because of an array of COVID-related support available to...
Reducing the compliance costs of regulation
In much of the world, property sales are highly regulated and expensive. Using World Bank data, this column shows that while regulators and...
Measuring human capital: Learning matters more than schooling
Human capital is a critical component of economic development. But the links between growth and human capital – when measured by years of schooling –...
Property Rights and Urban Form
How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities...
US business dynamism rises
Steep falls in entrepreneurial activity were recorded in early 2020 across G7 economies. In the US, however, the creation of US startups shot up by 24...
The Role of Sentiment in the Economy: 1920 to 1934
This paper investigates the role of sentiment in the US macro economy from 1920 to 1934. We use 2.4 million digitized articles from the Wall St...
Shaping Africa’s Post-Covid Recovery
With the exception of some flashpoints in Northern and Southern Africa, the continent has been largely spared from the direct health effect of Covid...
