The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

This paper evaluates the impact of access to credit from banks and other financial institutions on household welfare in Mauritania. Household level data are used to evaluate the relationship between credit access, a range of household characteristics, and welfare indicators. To address the threats of potential endogeneity, an index of household isolation is used to instrument access to credit. Evidence on the validity of the exclusion restriction is provided showing that household isolation is unrelated with households and area characteristics six years prior to the measurements on which this analysis is based. Results show that households with older and more educated heads are more likely to access financial services, as are households living in urban areas. In addition, greater financial access is associated with a reduced dependence on household production and increased investment in human capital. The policy conclusions from our analysis support strategies for expanding financial infrastructures in underserved rural areas of Mauritania.

Numerous studies have tried to explain the financial behaviour of firms based on different theories. Despite the vast and rich literature, only in the last decade has attention also been focused on emerging economies. In the first place, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the capital structure in an emerging economy, such as that of the Dominican Republic, testing the sustainability of the trade-off and pecking order theories. Secondly, we also investigated the impact of tax policy on the financial behaviour of businesses. In this perspective, this study overcomes the distorting problems associated with estimating the tax variable, as it uses data from each company's tax returns. The data were provided by the Ministry of Finance to the World Bank as part of a collaboration on the analysis of fiscal policy. A fixed-effects (FE) estimation technique has been employed to analyse the financial structure of companies. Overall, the results show that the individual determinants have a strong ability to explain the capital structure of companies, also highlighting that, in some cases, the fiscal variable influences the financial behaviour of companies

This paper examines the volatility transmission from energy and metal commodities to six major African exporters’ stock markets (Egypt for oil and gold, Nigeria for oil and gas, South Africa for coal and gold, Tunisia for oil, Uganda for gold and Zambia for copper). Modelling commodity volatility with the Double Asymmetric GARCH-MIDAS model with a Student’s t-distribution allows to detect the presence of impact and inertial stock market volatility spillovers at different lags and to take into account the leptokurtosis of the commodity series. We then derive the profile of Volatility Impulse Responses of the stock markets to commodity shocks.

This study investigates the role of digital capacities in the internationalisation processes of Italian provinces using a panel dataset built upon the territorial statistical database of ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics) for the period 2014–2017. The purpose is to explore the link between three internationalisation indicators (export value, export intensity and export in most dynamics sectors) and two ICT drivers (use of e-business digital technologies, such as cloud computing, and use of social media) expected to enable firms to share information along the supply chain and to ease firms’ communication and fixed cost investment. To purge the analysis from unobserved determinants of export performance and ICT adoption reverse causation problems, the identification relies on an instrumental variables approach that addresses the endogeneity of our two variables of interest related to ICT. The results show a significant relationship between the ICT capacities related to cloud adoption and our export indicators confirming the role of e-business digital technologies in explaining the export performance of Italian provinces. The use of social media also appears weakly able to impact on the export performances indicators. These results are robust to our endogeneity checks.