Financial inclusion might bring huge amounts of income into the global economy, which creates different opportunities and challenges for countries. As people become more financially included and their incomes grow over time, this might in turn increase their tax contributions to the government....

Financial inclusion is perceived as an enabler of poverty reduction around the world and today is in agenda of all policy makers in both developed and developing countries. In order to emphasize the importance of financial inclusion and provide an insight to the level of financial inclusion...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on links between domestic financial development and economic growth. It starts with the pioneers in this field and then classifies two main schools favouring liberal financial regimes. First McKinnon and Shaw advocated financial...

This paper investigates how past experience with banking crises influences an individual's trust in banks. We combine data on banking crises for the period 1970-2014 with individual data on trust in banks for 52 countries. We find that experiencing a banking crisis diminishes a person's trust in...

This paper offers a meta-regression analysis of the literature on the drivers of financial development. Our results based on 1900 estimates suggest that institutional quality is positively correlated to both private sector credit and stock market capitalization (both as share of GDP). Domestic...

We classify a large sample of banks according to the geographic diversification of their international syndicated loan portfolio. Our results show that diversified banks maintain higher loan supply during banking crises in borrower countries. The positive loan supply effects lead to higher...

This article reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the causal relationship between financial development and investment. Based on the literature considered, it can be concluded that there is little consensus to date on the direction of causality between financial development and...

We investigate the effect of financial integration on the degree of international business cycle synchronization. For identfication, we use a confidential database on banks' bilateral exposure over the past three decades and employ a novel bilateral country-pair panel instrumental vari- ables...

In an influential paper, La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer (2002) argued that public ownership of banks is associated with lower GDP growth. We show that this relationship does not hold for all countries, but depends on a country's financial development and political institutions. Public...

Credit reporting systems are an important ingredient for financial markets. These systems are based upon the unique identification of borrowers, which is enabled if a compulsory identification system exists in a country. We present evidence derived from difference-in-difference analyses on the...