The "Federalist financial revolution" may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that...

We study linkages between financial development, international trade, and long-run growth using data since 1880 for seventeen now-developed "Atlantic" economies and a set of cross-country and dynamic panel data models. We find that finance and trade reinforced each other before 1930, but that...

Does financial development enable growth in developing countries? We find evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where there is an urgent need to promote growth. Using a modern time series methodology and data for 22 countries over the period from 1960 to 2009, we find unidirectional...

A large body of evidence links financial development to economic growth, yet the channels through which inflation affects this relationship and its stability have been less thoroughly explored. We take an econometric and graphical approach to examining these channels, and find that higher levels...

It is generally thought that there is a negative long-term relationship between inflation and growth and a positive long-term relationship between financial development and growth. The existing empirical literature suggests that the finance-growth relationship is more robust than the...