June 2000 - 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...

July 1999 - This new database of indicators of financial development and structure across countries and over time unites a range of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets. Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Levine introduce a new database of...

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...

This paper explores the relationship between the relative size of the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector, economic growth, and poverty alleviation using a new database on the share of SME labor in the total manufacturing labor force. Using a sample of 45 countries, we find a strong,...

This article introduces a new database of indicators of financial structure and financial development across countries and over time. The database is unique in that it combines a wide variety of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets....

We assess the impact of bank deregulation on the distribution of income in the United States. From the 1970s through the 1990s, most states removed restrictions on intrastate branching, which intensified bank competition and improved bank performance. Exploiting the cross-state, cross-time...

Although research shows that financial development accelerates aggregate economic growth, economists have not resolved conflicting theoretical predictions and ongoing policy disputes about the cross-firm distributional effects of financial development. Using cross-industry, cross-country data,...

This article introduces the updated and expanded version of the Financial Development and Structure Database. The database includes indicators on the size, efficiency, and stability of banks, nonbank financial institutions, and equity and bond markets over 1960--2007. It also contains indicators...

While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, we study whether financial development disproportionately raises the incomes of the poor and alleviates poverty. Using a broad cross-country sample, we distinguish among competing theoretical predictions...