How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

We exploit the natural experiment of Japan's opening to international trade to examine how comparative advantage can shape a country's long-run path towards financial development. In the late 19th century, many of Japan's prefectures had a natural comparative advantage in silk reeling. Producing...

Late 19th century investors demanded compensation to invest in countries with poor institutional protection of property rights. Using the monthly stock returns of 1,808 firms located in 43 countries but traded in London between 1866 and 1907, we estimate the country-specific cost of capital. We...

Within the last decade sizeable capital inflows from mature economies were accompanied by rapid financial deepening in the Western Balkans, Turkey and the CIS. Notwithstanding their considerably different initial positions most countries sustained financial stability in the first period of the...

Real investment in Poland declined from 1990 to 1993, and only slowly recovered, while real credit decreased for a number of years, too. Has declining credit adversely affected investment? Controlling for industry and time fixed effect, and using dynamic panel data techniques, I estimate an...

The number of multinational banks have increased in transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe, while the amount of real credit has simultaneously decreased. Based on the cases of Poland and Hungary during the first six years of economic transition this paper investigates if there is a...

This paper examines the effects of political agreements on regional financial integration (RFI) on financial market development and access to and cost of finance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results suggest that RFI positively affects financial development - measured very broadly as the size of...

Employing the Pedroni co-integration technique and the GMM estimator, this paper aims at investigating the possible connection between financial development, financial openness and trade openness in twenty-nine Asian developing countries over 1994-2008. Firstly, we find a bidirectional causality...

During the 20th century all economic structures underwent the impact of two epochal phenomena, the communications revolution and the financialization of economy. As a consequence of the never ending technological progress, the first has repeatedly reduced the friction of distance, provoking a...