A growing body of post-global financial crisis (2007-2008) literature documents several undesirable effects of enlarged financial sectors. One of these effects is the 'growth cost' of excessive finance, which reports that the finance-growth relationship is non-monotonic, and that a credit...

The relationship between financial development and poverty is one that has not been extensively explored in the literature. This is the main objective of this paper. With a panel dataset of 147 countries between 1960 and 2008, and using infant mortality as a proxy indicator of poverty, the...

One of the central concerns in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has been the reduction of poverty and inequality so prevalent in the continent. Using large world samples, the literature has found that financial development increases economic growth, increases the income of the poor, and...

We estimate real losses arising from the cross-sectional misallocation of financial liabilities. Extending the framework of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) to the liabilities side of the balance sheet, and using manufacturing firm data from the United States and China, we find significant misallocation...

We study the relationship between financial constraints and employment formalization by exploiting heterogeneity in the industry-level degree of financial dependence, in the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998). This dependence, and variation in aggregate credit, lets us measure industry-level...