The paper examines the interpretation of firms' investment-cash flow sensitivity as an artifact of financial market imperfection. Two alternative explanations of the financial constraints are compared. One is based on informational problems (asymmetric information). The other focuses on limited...

Theoretical studies have shown that under unorthodox assumptions on preferences and production technologies, collateral constraints can act as a powerful amplification and propagation mechanism of exogenous shocks. We investigate whether or not this result hold under more standard assumptions....

This paper examines how the investment of financially constrained firms varies with their level of internal funds. We develop a theoretical model of optimal investment under financial constraints. Our model endogenizes the costs of external funds and allows for negative levels of internal funds....

Interfirm late payments are a hot issue in the EU, as witnessed by the 1998 bills passed in Italy and in the U.K. and by the soon to be approved EU Directive. Comprehensive information, especially on the effective own cost, is however almost absent in the literature. The paper provides the first...

This paper investigates the importance that market regulation and financial imperfections have on …rm growth. We analyse institutions affecting labor market as Employment Protection Laws (EP) and Product Market Regulation (PM). We show that together with the beneficial effects of …nancial...

This paper surveys the economic literature on the links between finance, law and growth in the Central and Eastern European transition countries. The literature that is surveyed at the outset of the paper shows that if a financial system is based on an adequate legal system it can positively...

We seek to contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993–2000 on 49 nations....

During the 80’s and 90’s, the increase in financial instability shook up the idyllic vision of the financial liberalization in developed nations. The difficulties borne by the banking sectors spread out in some Asian and Latin American countries as systemic crises. The deregulation of the...

We construct a new measure of financial development, through multivariate analysis, which includes several indicators of financial size and efficiency for 134 countries. Based on this broad measure, we assess empirically the determinants of financial development focusing on two factors not yet...

Focused on the case of China’s financial development, the present discursive essay sets out to argue that if the Chinese financial system distorted the allocation of funds then economic growth could not be sustained and financial depth would remain deficient. The essay puts forward selected...