This paper reviews the evolving literature that links financial development, financial crises, and economic growth in the past 20 years. The initial disconnect -- with one literature focusing on the effect of financial deepening on long -- run growth and another studying its impact on volatility...

With extensive country and firm-level data sets, this paper first documents that the financial sectors of most Sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. The paper also finds that population density appears to be considerably...

The paper documents the major trends in financial development in Latin America and the Caribbean since the early 1990s. The paper compares trends in Latin America and the Caribbean with those in Asia, Eastern Europe, and advanced countries and compares countries within Latin America and the...

This paper combines firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure, and uses two estimation approaches. It finds that in low-income countries, labor growth is swifter in countries with a higher level of private credit/gross domestic product; the positive...

This paper analyzes the bright and dark sides of the financial development process through the lenses of the four fundamental frictions to which agents are exposed -- information asymmetry, enforcement, collective action, and collective cognition. Financial development is shaped by the efforts...

This paper examines the evolving importance of banks and securities markets during the process of economic development. As economies develop, they increase their demand for the services provided by securities markets relative to those provided by banks, such that securities markets become...

Financial globalization, defined as global linkages through cross-border financial flows, has become increasingly relevant for emerging markets as they integrate financially with the rest of the world. This paper argues that, because of the way it is often measured, it has also led to the...

This paper investigates the causal impact of oil price fluctuations on financial markets since January 2014. Following a heteroscedasticity-based event study approach, the paper instruments changes in oil prices by exogenous shocks in oil supply. It finds that oil price declines raise...

This paper computes a new financial globalization index for a large sample of countries for 1992-2016. Unlike other measures, the financial globalization index corrects for the heteroscedasticity of global volatility. This leads to a downward adjustment of financial globalization trends for...

Private savings play a pivotal role in financing development and sustaining growth. Recently, there have been many theoretical developments that underpin key determinants of savings behavior, many of which merit empirical investigation. Understanding the dynamics of the determinants of savings...