Discussion Papers

In the three-quarters of a century since Pakistan’s independence, parliament has adopted various laws in a bid to improve women’s legal rights. Many...

This paper investigates how consumers and investors react to the standardized disclosure of data privacy practices. Since December 2020, Apple has...

Using a representative survey of U.S. lawyers, we document a sizeable gender gap in early partnership aspirations, which explains half of the later...

Competitive challenges and regulatory uncertainty associated with the green transition should incentivize firms to innovate and to sway regulatory...

Investors have limited and time-varying attention. These constraints are heterogeneous across investors, which can create asymmetric information and...

In the sixty years since its independence Burundi has taken some steps to improve the legal standing of women in the economy and society. These steps...

Zimbabwe has introduced some legal reforms towards women’s rights in the first three dozen years since its independence in 1980, though these changes...

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...