Between the early-1970s and the mid-1990s, the U.S. banking sector was deregulated and U.S. workers gained more statuary basic protections. The effects of these two reforms on productive activity have largely been studied separately in the finance and labor literatures. Yet they only have...

"The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competition in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper Claessens and Laeven first estimate for 16 countries...