This paper investigates the effect of firm-level investment on the levels of income inequality and poverty. Using a sample of firms from 87 countries for the period from 1979 to 2018, we document that firm-level investment is negatively associated with various measures of income inequality. This...

The industrial organization of developing countries is characterized by the pervasive use of subcontracting arrangements among small, financially constrained firms. This paper asks whether vertical integration relaxes those financial constraints. It shows that vertical integration trades off the...

This paper investigates the major drivers of governmental redistribution. We retest the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis and account for a plethora of political, institutional, and cultural forces that influence the scope of redistribution. Extended and harmonized data on effective redistribution...

In this paper, I measure the importance of remittances and financial development for developing countries. I estimate an index of overall financial conditions and use it to determine the relevance of the financial sector as a transmission channel for remittances to affect economic growth. The...

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...

Joseph A. Schumpeter is one of the most famous economists of the 20th century and the ’patron saint’ of the finance and growth literature. We have discovered that the prevailing literature has, however, misinterpreted Schumpeter, which leads to puzzling empirical results and difficulties in...

This paper mainly examines the effect of financial development on the recession, while controlling for potential recession factors. Using panel data of 129 countries spanning 1990-2010, we implemented "Locally Weighted Scatterplot Smoothing", "Local Linear" and "Iteratively Reweighted Least...

We report evidence that the relation between the financial sector share, private savings and growth in the United States 1948-1996 is characterized by several regime shifts. The finding is based on vector autoregressions on quarterly data that allow for Markov switching regimes. The evidence may...

Why do countries tend to repay their domestic and external debt, even though the legal enforcement of the sovereign debt contract is limited? Contrary to conventional wisdom, we argue that temporary market exclusion after default is costly. When the domestic financial market is characterized by...

We develop a macroeconomic model with a moral hazard problem between financial intermediaries and households, which causes inefficient resource allocation, to make us reconsider the financial regulation according to financial development, and individual and aggregate economic activities in the...