Using data from Thailand's 2007 Industrial Census, this research studied resource misallocation across manufacturing plants and its impact on manufacturing total factor productivity (TFP). It is found that there is more resource misallocation across plants in Thailand than in China, India, and the US, as well as in some other countries. When resource misallocation in Thailand is hypothetically reduced to the extent observed in the USA, manufacturing TFP increases by about seventy per cent. It is also found that manufacturing plants under government ownership or located in the northern region of Thailand have lower productivity, yet face lower input and output distortions than other plants. Also, medium‐sized plants face higher distortions than smaller and larger plants.

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ABSTRACT. Corruption in bank lending can seriously adversely affect credit allocation. Besides banking factors, national culture can also affect the corruption of bank officials. Prior studies have shown that collectivism increases bank corruption. This paper aims to assess the effects of cultural dimensions, besides collectivism, on the corruption of bank officials. Instead of using Hofstede's cultural data, this paper uses the data from the GLOBE project which is more recent and reports more cultural dimensions than Hofstede's. Using the data covering more than 3000 firms in 32 countries, this paper finds that humane orientation increases the corruption of bank officials. The effect of humane orientation on the corruption of bank officials is not only statistically significant but also economically relevant. The magnitude of its effect is relatively comparable to that of collectivism.

ABSTRACT. The issue of connected lending is shown to be prevalent in many countries. This paper documents that in cross-country data connected lending is negatively associated with aggregate output and aggregate productivity. A model incorporating connected lend is presented and used to quantitatively study the effect of connected lending on aggregate productivity. The results show that connected lending has a moderately negative effect on aggregate productivity and can be better explained by the crony view than the information view. This implies that special connections between firms and banks generally do not reduce the asymmetric information between them.