The authors use existing measures of the financial system - and construct many new measures - to document the relationship between the financial system and long-run growth in a cross-section of countries between 1960 and 1989. They consider various measures of the size of the financial system,...

Few economic ideas are as intuitive as the notion that increasing investment is the best way to raise future output. This idea was the basis for the theory"capital fundamentalism."Under this view, differences in national stocks of capital were the primary determinants of differences in levels of...

Joseph Schumpeter argued in 1911 that the services provided by financial intermediaries - mobilizing savings, evaluating projects, managing risk, monitoring managers, and facilitating transactions -stimulate technological innovation and economic development. The authors present evidence that...

Recent research has convinced the author that once all the benefits are recognized, investment in the education of girls may be the highest return of investment available in the developing world. The author stresses five major points: (1) higher death rates are symptomatic of the more general...

That the financial sector should be liberalized was the orthodox view in the mid-1970s, during a pendulum swing toward reliance on the free market. In the early 1980s, the pendulum swung back to the left, based partly on evidence - especially from Latin America - that overly rapid reform had...

With cross-country, time series data on health (infant and child mortality, and life expectancy) and per capita income, the authors estimate the effect of income on health. They use instrumental variables estimation to identify the effect of income on health that is structural and causal,...