In this note, we revisit an earlier, highly influential paper on Financial Dependence and Growth by Rajan and Zingales (1998), by re-examining their assumptions, and the robustness of their results to alternative theories and interpretations. We first show that they may be implicitly testing...

Analysis of a panel data set for 1976-98 shows that on balance stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth; findings that do not result from biases induced by simultaneity, omitted variables, or unobserved country-specific effects

Large and foreign-owned institutions may have difficulty extending relationship loans to informationally opaque small firms. Bank distress does not appear to affect small business lending, although even small firms may react to bank distress by borrowing from multiple banks

When negative monetary and financial shocks hit the Korean economy, reactions in the financial system amplified the impact of the shocks by reducing the credit available and increasing its cost. This particularly hurt segments of the economy that rely heavily on bank credit for external...