This paper presents evidence that public debts in the advanced economies have surged in recent years to levels not recorded since the end of World War II, surpassing the heights reached during the First World War and the Great Depression. At the same time, private debt levels, particularly those...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...

For over a century, economists and policy makers have debated the relative merits of bank-based versus market-based financial systems. Recent research, however, argues that classifying countries as bank-based or market is not a very fruitful way to distinguish financial systems. This paper...

This paper reviews, appraises, and critiques theoretical and empirical research on the connections between the operation of the financial system and economic growth. While subject to ample qualifications and countervailing views, the preponderance of evidence suggests that both financial...

A considerable literature has examined the causes, consequences, and policy responses to surges in international capital flows. A related strand of papers has attempted to catalog current account reversals and capital account quot;sudden stops.quot; This paper offers an encompassing approach...

This paper investigates the impact of stock markets and banks on economic growth using a panel data set for the period 1976-98 and applying recent GMM techniques developed for dynamic panels. On balance, we find that stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth and these findings...

We study economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. Our analysis is based on new data on forty-four countries spanning about two hundred years. The dataset incorporates over 3,700 annual observations covering a wide range of political systems,...

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 paper uses new data and new econometric techniques to investigate the impact of international financial integration on economic growth and also to assess whether this relationship depends on the level of economic development, financial development, legal system development, government...