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This paper investigates the labor market outcomes for refugee and urban national communities in Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic, using five waves of a novel high-frequency phone survey collected between May 2020 and June 2021. Even after conditioning on age, gender, educational attainment, and area of living, only 32 percent of refugees were employed in February 2020 compared with 63 percent of nationals. With the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, the share of employed for both refugees and nationals fell by around 36 percent, such that in May-June 2020, only 21 percent of refugees were still employed compared with 40 percent of nationals. Using a panel setup with wave and location fixed effects, the analysis finds that the recovery in the share of employed, hours worked, and household incomes was slower and often stagnant for refugees compared with the recovery of nationals. These differences cannot be explained by demographic factors, living in an urban or camp environment, having been employed previously, or sectoral choice, suggesting that a third, unobservable “refugee factor” inhibits refugees’ recovery after a major shock and aggravates preexisting vulnerabilities.

The relationship between bank competition, firm access to finance, and economic growth is a much debated topic in the economic literature and in policy circles. This paper uses a panel of 23 manufacturing sectors over 2002-10 to investigate the impact of bank competition on industry growth in the Gulf Cooperation Council economies. The results show that greater competition allows financially dependent firms to grow faster. In addition, the results show that lower restrictions on banks’ permissible activities, better credit information, and greater institutional effectiveness mitigate the damaging impact of low competition. These results are robust to a variety of checks. The findings suggest that improving bank competition should be an important aspect of the financial sector development agenda in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

A unique dataset of over 70,000 firms, most of which are small, in over 100 countries, is utilized to systematically study the use of different financing sources for new and young firms. Consistent age-related patterns emerge. Across all countries younger firms rely less on bank financing and more on informal financing. There is a clear substitution effect: as firms mature, more firms switch out of informal finance toward bank finance, while the total proportion of firms using external finance remains relatively unchanged. Importantly, these relationships hold for firms of different sizes, firms in different sectors, and firms located in countries with different income levels and on different continents. Thus, these patterns of young firm financing show clear universal tendencies. Given that even small firms increasingly use formal bank financing over time, these results suggest that information asymmetry plays an important role in decreasing a young firm's ability to obtain bank finance.

Growing research and policy interest focuses on the misallocation of output and factors of production in developing economies. This paper considers the possible misallocation of financial loans. Using plant-level data on the organized and unorganized sectors, the paper describes the temporal, geographic, and industry distributions of financial loans. The focus of the analysis is the hypothesis that land misallocation might be an important determinant of financial misallocation (for example, because of the role of land as collateral against loans). Using district-industry variations, the analysis finds evidence to support this hypothesis, although it does not find a total reduction in the intensity of financial loans or those being given to new entrants. The analysis also considers differences by gender of business owners and workers in firms. Although potential early gaps for businesses with substantial female employment have disappeared in the organized sector, a sizeable and persistent gap remains in the unorganized sector.

The empirical literature on institutions and development has been challenged on grounds of reverse causality, measurement error in institutional indicators, and heterogeneity. This paper uses firm-level data across countries to confront these challenges. Instead of analyzing ultimate outcomes, such as income levels where institutional quality is likely endogenous, the focus is on firm-level external finance. Moreover, institutions are “unbundled” to explore how various types of institutions affect external finance differently. The paper documents that micro firms have significantly less access to external finance than small and medium firms. General financial development and contracting institutions that facilitate transactions between private parties exert little effect, on average, on firms’ access to external finance. In contrast, property rights institutions that constrain political and economic elites exhibit stronger positive association with access to external finance. The analysis finds evidence of attenuation bias associated with error in measuring institutions. For leveling the playing field between elite and non-elite firms (as proxied by firm size) in their access to external finance, property rights institutions also figure more prominently—with an important exception for the information environment, a component of contracting institutions. The results indicate that a specific channel through which development is affected more by property rights institutions rather than contracting institutions is external financing for firms.

Despite regulatory efforts designed to make it easier for firms to formalize, informality remains extremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the region, business registration in a national registry is separate from tax registration. This paper provides initial results from an experiment in Malawi that randomly allocated firms into a control group and three treatment groups: a) a group offered assistance for costless business registration; b) a group offered assistance with costless business registration and (separate) tax registration; and c) a group offered assistance for costless business registration along with an information session at a bank that ended with the offer of business bank accounts. The study finds that all three treatments had extremely large impacts on business registration, with 75 percent of those offered assistance receiving a business registration certificate. The findings offer a cost-effective way of getting firms to formalize in this dimension. However, in common with other studies, information and assistance has a limited impact on tax registration. The paper measures the short-term impacts of formalization on financial access and usage. Business registration alone has no impact for either men or women on bank account usage, savings, or credit. However, the combination of formalization assistance and the bank information session results in significant impacts on having a business bank account, financial practices, savings, and use of complementary financial products.