Using information from 193 banks in 58 countries, the authors develop and analyze indicators of physical access, affordability, and eligibility barriers to deposit, loan, and payment services. They find substantial cross-country variation in barriers to banking and show that in many countries...

Theory makes ambiguous predictions about the effects of bank concentration on access to external finance. Using a unique data base for 74 countries offinancing obstacles and financing patterns for firms of small, medium, and large size, the authors assess the effects of banking market structure...

A growing body of work suggests that cross-country differences in legal origin help explain differences in financial development. The authors assess two theories of why legal origin influences financial development. First, the"political"channel stresses that (1) legal traditions differ in the...

The authors assess three established theories about the historical determinants of financial development. They also propose an augmented version of one of these theories. The law and finance view, stresses that different legal traditions emphasize, to differing degrees, the rights of individual...

This paper introduces the updated and expanded version of the Financial Development and Structure Database and presents recent trends in structure and development of financial institutions and markets across countries. The authors add indicators on banking structure and financial globalization....

This paper discusses the different functions that capital markets and banks have in economic development, and it reviews the debate about marketbased vs. bank-based financial systems. Using data for a sample of 40 countries over the period 1975-98, the paper then shows that variation in both...

Which commercial bank supervisory policies ease - or intensify - the degree to which bank corruption is an obstacle to firms raising external finance? Based on new data from more than 2,500 firms across 37 countries, this paper provides the first empirical assessment of the impact of different...

This paper investigates the impact of stock markets and banks on economic growth using a panel data set for the period 1976-98 and applying recent GMM techniques developed for dynamic panels. On balance, we find that stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth and these findings...

Public policy debates and theoretical disputes motivate this paper%u2019s examination of (i) the relationship between bank concentration and banking system fragility and (ii) the mechanisms underlying this relationship. We find no support for the view that concentration increases the fragility...

This paper provides a concise, selective review of research on the role of legal institutions in shaping the operation of financial systems. While a burgeoning literature finds that financial development exerts a first-order impact on economic growth, the law and finance literature seeks to...