Discussion Papers

In 2023, Zambia ranked 17th among African countries on the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law index, a notable decline over a half century. The...

This paper uses legal board size requirements to test whether board size affects firm performance and value. Since 1976, the minimum size of German...

Rwanda is among Africa’s leaders in providing equal opportunity between women and men in the economy. Progress in achieving this substantial progress...

Innovativity – an economy's ability to produce the innovations that drive total factor productivity (TFP) growth – requires both ideas and the ability...

We find some evidence of regulatory convergence in four distinct areas of business activity over the 2005-2019 period. This convergence is most...

We present suggestive evidence that new technology has reduced business regulation globally over the 2005-2019 period, in the areas of paying...

Endogenous cycles are generated by the two-way interaction between lenders’ behavior in the credit market and production fundamentals. When lenders...

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities...

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...

Since 1978 China has developed strongly using a particular form of capitalism which has relied upon close relations between private enterprise and the...

This paper studies how managers react to shareholder empowerment that makes the votes on shareholder proposals regarding majority-voting director...

Universal owners - large institutional investors with highly diversified and long-term portfolios spanning the entire global capital market - have...

We use a 50-year panel of gendered laws for 190 countries to examine whether laws and legal change are associated with several measures of women’s...

What drives actual government policies after financial crises? In this paper, we first present a simple model of post-crisis policymaking driven by...

We explore the dynamics of media chatter about economic reforms using text analysis from about a billion newspaper articles in 28 languages. We show...

We theoretically analyze how index investing affects financial markets using a dynamic exchange economy with heterogeneous investors and two Lucas...