This paper examines whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. We define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

Policymakers and economists disagree about the impact of bank regulations on the distribution of income. Exploiting cross-state and cross-time variation, the authors test whether liberalizing restrictions on intra-state branching in the United States intensified, ameliorated, or had no effect on...

Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine examine the impact of bank supervision on the financing obstacles faced by almost 5,000 corporations across 49 countries. They find that firms in countries with strong official supervisory agencies that directly monitor banks tend to face greater financing...

Do industries that depend heavily on external finance grow faster in market-based or bank-based financial systems? Are new firms more likely to form in a bank-based or a market-based financial system? Beck and Levine find no evidence for the superiority of either market-based or bank-based...

While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine study whether financial development is pro-poor: Does financial development disproportionately raise the income of the poor? Using a broad cross-country sample, the authors...

Development of the banking sector exerts a large, causal impact on total factor productivity growth, which in turn causes GDP to grow. Whether banking development has a long-run effect on capital growth or private saving remains to be seen.Beck, Levine, and Loayza evaluate whether the level of...

The authors examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. They define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

This paper contributes to the literature on how a country's legal origin influences the operation of its financial system by using firm-level survey data on the obstacles that firms face in raising external finance. The paper assesses two channels through which legal origin may influence the...

Motivated by public policy debates about bank consolidation and conflicting theoretical predictions about the relationship between the market structure of the banking industry and bank fragility, this paper studies the impact of bank concentration, bank regulations, and national institutions on...

Analysis of a panel data set for 1976-1998 shows that on balance stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth - findings that do not result from biases induced by simultaneity, omitted variables, or unobserved country-specific effects.Beck and Levine investigate the impact of...