Finance is a vital ingredient for economic growth, but there can also be too much of it. This study investigates what fifty years of data for OECD countries have to say about the role of the financial sector for economic growth and income inequality and draws policy implications. Over the past...

This paper develops dynamic measures of the systemic risk of the financial sector as a whole. It defines systemic risk as the conditional probability of failure of a sufficiently large fraction of the total population of financial institutions. This definition recognizes that the cause of...