This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

Does it matter for domestic investment whether a country's financial system is bank based or stock-market based? This paper posits that financial intermediation affects domestic investment notably by alleviating financing constraints, allowing firms to increase investment in response to...