There is a large body of literature stressing the importance of developing financial markets, including stock markets, to enhance countries' growth. I argue that the relationship between stock markets and growth is exaggerated and that the simple act of opening a formal stock market is not a...

In the context of an autoregressive panel data model with fixed effect, we examine the relationship between consistent parameter estimation and consistent model selection. Consistency in parameter estimation is achieved by using the tansformation of the fixed effect proposed by Lancaster (2002)....