Capital Misallocation and Financial Development : A Sector-Level Analysis

This study investigates how financial development affects capital allocation across industries in a panel of countries at different stages of development (China, India, Mexico, Korea, Japan and the US) over the period 1980-2014. Following the approach proposed by Chari et al (2007) and Aoki (2012), we compute wedges for capital and labour inputs for 26 industrial sectors in the six countries and add them up to economy-wide measures of capital and labour misallocation. We find that more developed financial systems allocate capital investment more efficiently than less developed ones. If financial development is low, faster capital accumulation is associated with a worsening of allocative efficiency. This effect reverses for higher levels of financial development. Sectors with high R&D expenditures or high capital investment benefit most from financial development. These effects are not only statistically significant, they are also large in economic terms