Vanesa Pesqué-Cela

Drawing on signalling theory and using the cases of Alibaba and Coupang, we investigate whether and how venture capital-backed companies from emerging markets use CSR to overcome the liability of foreignness when going public in the US. Our findings suggest that such firms strategically increase their CSR activities prior to their IPO in order to signal legitimacy to investors. They also suggest that firms with both strong and weak CSR signalling strategies (as measured by signal cost, frequency and consistency) are equally likely to have successful IPOs when they are backed by reputable venture capital firms.

We develop a theory linking financial inclusion, defined as access to formal loans and financial assets, to income inequality. Initial inequality of households is modeled by a random variable determining initial endowments. These initial endowments can be used to invest instantaneously in human capital and financial assets. Human capital translates into income based on a strictly concave production function, suggesting optimal levels of investment. Financial assets earn yields which do not depend on the amount invested by individuals. Theoretical predictions are tested using the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) for 2011 and 2013. Initial conditions modeled by a random variable are replaced by an actual distribution of income or assets to derive theoretical predictions regarding the proportion of the population that might benefit from financial inclusion. Financial inclusion does mitigate under-investment in education - but formal loans do not contribute. Income inequality worsens if households rely on formal or informal loans, whereas access to bank accounts improves households' prospects in the future income distribution. However, households below the 40th percentile of household income do benefit from informal loans.

Although theory suggests that financial market imperfections - mainly information asymmetries, market segmentation and transaction costs - prevent poor people from escaping poverty by limiting their access to formal financial services, new financial technologies (FinTech) are seen as key enablers of financial inclusion. Indeed, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN-2030-ASD) and the G20 High-Level Principles for Digital Financial Inclusion (G20-HLP-DFI) highlight the importance of harnessing the potential of FinTech to reduce financial exclusion and income inequality. This paper investigates the interrelationship between FinTech, financial inclusion and income inequality for a panel of 140 countries using the Global Findex waves of survey data for 2011, 2014 and 2017. We posit that FinTech affects inequality directly and indirectly through financial inclusion. We invoke quantile regression analysis to investigate whether such effects differ across countries with different levels of income inequality. We uncover new evidence that financial inclusion is a key channel through which FinTech reduces income inequality. We also find that while financial inclusion significantly reduces inequality at all quantiles of the inequality distribution, these effects are primarily associated with higher-income countries. Overall, our results support the aspirations of the UN-2030-ASD and G20-HLP-DFI.

This study re-examines the construct of financial inclusion, through a literature review and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). First, we conduct a systematic review of definitions, measures and data sources. Second, we apply CFA to test two prominent financial inclusion indices. The CFA analysis reveals a high correlation between the 'access' and 'use' dimensions; hence, indices fail to capture the multidimensionality of financial inclusion. Existing indices tend to be biased towards measuring the supply-side and quantitative aspects of financial inclusion. The extent to which lower income individuals and smaller firms have been incorporated into the formal financial sector is not captured.

Can political decentralization and the introduction of local elections improve government accountability and public goods provision in a non-democratic regime like China? Political decentralization reforms in China have only been implemented at the village level, and have been implemented unevenly across villages. Villages differ substantially in terms of the quality of their elections and the amount of power given to (or taken away from) their popularly elected village committees. In light of these differences, this paper investigates the relationship between political decentralization processes and government performance in the rural Chinese context, by addressing the question of whether democratically elected village committees are more responsive to villagers’ demands for better infrastructure in their communities, when given the power to govern. To explain differences among villages in terms of whether and how much they invest in new infrastructure, a tobit model of village-financed investment is estimated using cross-sectional survey data collected from over 100 villages. Results from the regression analysis indicate that variation in the degree of political decentralization is positively associated with variation in the level of public goods investment across villages: villages governed by democratically elected village committees tend to invest more in new infrastructures. These results are robust to the endogeneity between governance and public goods provision. Our findings from rural China illustrate the potential and limitations of political decentralization reforms to enhance government accountability in non-democratic regimes. In some communities, they have improved government performance, but in many others they have failed to make elected local governments accountable to citizens because they have failed to devolve authority and resources to them in the first place. The challenge thus is not only to make decentralization work but, more fundamentally, to make decentralization happen.