The authors explore the relationship between financial structure - the degree to which a financial system is market- or bank-based - and economic development. They use three methodologies: 1) The cross-country approach uses cross-country data to assess whether economies grow faster with market-...

The authors explore the relationship between financial structure - the degree to which a financial system is market- or bank-based - and economicdevelopment. They use three methodologies: 1) The cross-country approach uses cross-country data to assess whether economies grow faster with market-...

This paper discusses Islamic banking products and interprets them in the context of financial intermediation theory. Anecdotal evidence shows that many of the conventional products can be redrafted as Sharia-compliant products, so that the differences are smaller than expected. Comparing...

Using a firm-level survey database covering 48 countries, the authors investigate whether differences in financial and legal development affect the way firms finance their investments. The results indicate that external financing of investments is not a function of institutions, although the...

Theory makes ambiguous predictions about the effects of bank concentration on access to external finance. Using a unique data base for 74 countries of financing obstacles and financing patterns for firms of small, medium, and large size, the authors assess the effects of banking market structure...

The authors investigate how a country's financial institutions and the quality of its legal system explain the size attained by its largest industrial firms in a sample of 44 countries. Firm size is positively related to the size of the banking system and the efficiency of the legal system....

Using a firm-level survey database covering 48 countries, we investigate how financial and institutional development affects financing of large and small firms. Our database is not limited to large firms but includes small and medium-size firms and data on a broad spectrum of financing sources,...

Using a unique firm-level survey data base, covering fifty four countries, the authors investigate whether different financial, legal, and corruption issues that firms report as constraints, actually affect their growth rates. The results show that the extent to which these factors constrain a...