Is There an Optimum Level of Financial Activity?

This paper addresses the notion of an "optimum level of financial activity" that is contingent on a country's general level of development. Referring to threshold regressions and a bootstrap test for structural shift of the finance regressor in a growth equation, it is shown that countries gain less from a given level of financial activity, if the latter fails to keep up with or exceeds what would follow from a balanced expansion path. The paper contributes to the literature on the finance-growth nexus in providing empirical support for the notion of "balanced" financial development with a development specific optimum level of financial activity.