Reducing income inequality is one of the goals under the Sustainable Development Goals. This study examines the intricate relationship between financial development, policy uncertainty, inflation, and income inequality. Panel data for African countries covering the period 2000-2022 were used in...

Savings problem has become a crucial issue since it is one of the reasons of today's frequently-observed-financial crisis. There are several theories explaining this problem in the framework of consumption theory. Inequality in income distribution affects saving behavior. In this sense, our...

Output growth, investment and the real interest rate are all found empirically to be negatively affected by inflation. But a seeming puzzle arises of opposite Tobin-like inflation effects because theory indicates a negative Tobin effect when investment falls and a positive Tobin effect when the...

The small sample performance of system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and an alternative Transformed Maximum Likelihood (TML) estimator is investigated in Monte Carlo simulations, implementing a data generating process that tracks important features inherent in dynamic panels used in...

This paper is a preliminary exploration of the politics of financial market development. Using panel data for 197 countries over 34 years, we test a range of variables and hypotheses regarding the politics of financial market development. We find only weak support for the legal origins...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

Output growth, investment and the real interest rate in long run evidence tend to be negatively affected by inflation. Theoretically, inflation acts as a human capital tax that decreases output growth and the real interest rate, but increases the investment rate, opposite of evidence. The paper...

Using an international sample of firms from 25 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we document that societal trust is negatively associated with tax avoidance, even after controlling for other institutional determinants such as home country legal institutions and tax system...

Does enhancing banks' information sets and understanding of credit risks improve loan loss recognition? We study this question using a global dataset of staggered initiations and coverage increases of public credit registries (PCRs). Mandated by national regulators, PCRs collect borrower and...

Investors face a dizzying array of choices regarding where to invest their funds and increasingly rely on experts for advice. Most advice about securities is provided by investment advisers or broker-dealers, legal categories with little meaning to most people but fraught with consequences....