Studies on the finance-growth link use different proxy variables for financial development. Among the most used is the total credit share in the GDP. Previous empirical studies show to be sensitive to the choice of the finance proxy indicator. Total credit share in the GDP appears biased in...

In this paper, we document the fact that countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. We measure the incidence of crisis with the skewness of credit growth, and find that it has a robust negative...