The paper describes tests of hypotheses from economic history concerning the significance of financial development as a determinant of economic growth. It goes beyond the existing studies in drawing on a large panel data set covering 93 countries from 1970-90 and includes a new proxy for the...

In their introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on Great Depressions of the 20th Century (Vol. 5, 2002), Timothy J. Kehoe and Edward C. Prescott argue that in the last few years great depressions have hit two rich countries: New Zealand and Switzerland. We briefly...

To clarify the causal links between financial activity and economic growth, three theoretical models are analyzed and a structural equation path models is estimated. In the modeling part, poverty traps result from large fixed costs or high proportions of real investment to run a financial...

The paper describes tests of hypotheses from economic history concerning the significance of financial development as a determinant of economic growth. It goes beyond the existing studies in drawing on a large panel data set covering 93 countries from 1970-90 and includes a new proxy for the...

This paper describes tests of several hypotheses put forward in the literature on the significance of education as a determinant of economic development. It is shown that the generally positive impact of education on economic development is severely impaired by 'educational imbalance' in the...

This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...