Expanding access to financial services holds the promise to help reduce poverty and spur economic development. But, as a practical matter, commercial banks have faced challenges expanding access to poor and low-income households in developing economies, and nonprofits have had limited reach. We...

Financial liberalization has been a controversial issue, as empirical evidence for growth enhancing effects is mixed. Here, we find sizable welfare gains from liberalization (cost to repression), though the gain in economic growth is ambiguous. We take the view that financial liberalization is a...

In this paper I simplify the modeling of transitional dynamics and empirically explain why so many developing economies have seen their per capita income diverge from that of most OECD economies. I also provide evidence that strongly supports conditional convergence among the sample considered...

The relationship between financial liberalization and poverty has been the subject of significant work and scrutiny in the field of development economics, however much of this criticism has been based upon empirical foundations and has rarely been extended to reconcile with the theory of...

This study investigates the impact of corruption on public and private investment in African countries as a way of exploring one channel through which corruption undermines growth. The empirical results indicate that corruption affects economic growth directly and through its impact on...

A large body of evidence suggests that poor countries tend to invest less (have lower PPP - adjusted investment rates) and to face higher relative prices of investment goods. It has been suggested that this happens either because these countries have lower TFP in the investment - good producing...

This paper explores the impact of antiquity on capitalism through the finance-growth nexus. We define antiquity as the length of established statehood (i.e., state history) and agricultural years. We argue that extractive institutions and deeply entrenched interest groups may prevail in...

This paper presents an analysis of the effect of bureaucratic corruption on economic growth through a public finance transmission channel. At the theoretical level, we develop a simple dynamic general equilibrium model in which financial intermediaries make portfolio decisions on behalf of...

Using an endogenous growth model in which countries differ with respect to property rights protection, the paper analyzes the growth and welfare effects of removing capital controls, and studies the political support for a reform which improves the quality of property rights. When these are...

This paper examines the relationship between the legal system and banking development and traces this connection through to long-run rates of per capita GDP growth, capital stock growth, and productivity growth. The data indicate that countries where the legal system (1) emphasizes creditor...