Building Bridges Between Finance and Development

May 20-21, 2009

Organizers

In developing countries, many household members are also entrepreneurs or proprietors of microenterprises. To study household financial decision making and the effect of legal institutions on the behavior of entrepreneurs, this conference brought together leading economists from two important subfields in economics: development and finance. The conference investigated the impact of financial opportunities and constraints on individuals and firms in order to better understand the microeconomic underpinnings of economic development and the consequent policy implications. (Co-sponsored with the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty at the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)

Sponsors

Program

The Dynamics of Reforms: Productivity Growth and Capital Flows

  • Paco Buera (UCLA) and Yongseok Shin (Washington University at St. Louis)
  • Paper details »

Entrepreneurs, Legal Institutions, and Firm Dynamics

  • Anne Villamil (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
  • Neus Herranz (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
  • and Stefan Krasa (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
  • Paper details »

Credit RationingMacro Volatilityand Industrial Evolution in Developing Countries

  • James Tybout (Pennsylvania State University)
  • Eric Bond (Vanderbilt University)
  • Hâle Utar (University of Colorado, Boulder)
  • Paper details »

Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing

  • Adair Morse (University of Chicago)
  • Marianne Bertrand (University of Chicago)
  • Paper (.pdf) »

Risk and Return in Village Economies

  • Krislert Samphantharak (University of California, San Diego)
  • Robert M. Townsend (MIT)

Measuring Marginal Returns in Microenterprises, Experimentally

  • Chris Woodruff (University of California
  • San Diego)
  • Suresh de Mel (University of Peradeniya)
  • David McKenzie (World Bank)
  • Paper (.pdf) »