Is public expenditure productive

Legal and accounting reform that strengthens creditor rights, contract enforcement, and accounting practices boosts financial development and accelerates economic growth. Levine, Loayza, and Beck evaluate: Whether the level of development of financial intermediaries exerts a casual influence on economic growth. Whether cross-country differences in legal and accounting systems (such as creditor rights, contract enforcement, and accounting standards) explain differences in the level of financial development. Using both traditional cross-section, instrumental-variable procedures and recent dynamic panel techniques, they find that development of financial intermediaries exerts a large causal impact on growth. The data also show that cross-country differences in legal and accounting systems help determine differences in financial development. Together, these findings suggest that legal and accounting reform that strengthens creditor rights, contract enforcement, and accounting practices boosts financial development and accelerates economic growth. This paper - a product of Macroeconomics and Growth, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the links between the financial system and economic growth. Thorsten Beck may be contacted at tbeck@worldbank.org.

Financial Intermediation and Growth: Causality and Causes

http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/ross_levine/Papers/2000_JME_Fin%20Int%20Growth%20Causality.pdf

Financial intermediation and growth: Causality and causes ☆

The ultimate ownership of Western European corporations

In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. We summarize this evidence and attempt a unified interpretation. We also address several objections to the empirical claim that legal origins matter. Finally, we assess the implications of this research for economic reform.

/pdf/the-economic-consequences-of-legal-origins-3phhiol1rf.pdf

The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins

Industrial banks: Challenging the traditional separation of commerce and banking

In view of the growing importance of P2P lending in China, we investigate the role of the level of education of a borrower on the demand for funding. We collect and analyze data for more than 10,000 transactions obtained from Renrendai.com, a popular P2P company operating in China. Our analysis indicates that individuals with higher levels of education demand smaller loans for any given interest rate and lower interest rates for any given loan amount, controlling for a variety of factors. This finding applies to individuals demanding both personal and business loans. The same result holds, moreover, when an individual’s credit information is available to a P2P company online. Several robustness tests confirm our basic empirical findings.

How Does a Borrower's Education Influence Demand for Peer-to-Peer Funding? New Evidence from China

In this paper and the associated online database, we provide new data and measures of bank regulatory and supervisory policies in 180 countries from 1999 to 2011. The data include and the measures are based upon responses to hundreds of questions, including information on permissible bank activities, capital requirements, the powers of official supervisory agencies, information disclosure requirements, external governance mechanisms, deposit insurance, barriers to entry, and loan provisioning. The dataset also provides information on the organization of regulatory agencies and the size, structure, and performance of banking systems. Since the underlying surveys are large and complex, we construct summary indices of key bank regulatory and supervisory policies to facilitate cross-country comparisons and analyses of changes in banking policies over time.

Bank Regulation and Supervision in 180 Countries from 1999 to 2011

Inverted Yield Curves And Financial Institutions

The exact criteria used by state governors for choosing opportunity zones (OZs) are not publicly available. This paper aims to examine whether state governors selected the most distressed communities, or those with the highest proportions of minorities, as OZs.,This paper compares the distressed communities chosen as OZs in states throughout the country to an equal number of those eligible distressed communities but not selected. Moreover, this paper uses regression analysis to determine whether the poverty rate, median family income, population, percentage of population that is minority and the percentage of population that is African American are significant explanatory factors in the choice of OZs.,After describing the tax incentives for investing in OZs, this paper documents that governors did not select many of the most distressed communities, or those with high proportions of minorities, in their individual states.,This paper describes in some detail the way in which investors may generate tax benefits by investing in eligible property or businesses in OZs. It also examines the extent to which the degree of poverty and the percentage of the population that is minority (and African American) were key factors in the selection of OZs. It arises an issue that the chosen communities are not necessarily those most in need of more investment or those heavily populated by minorities, particularly African Americans.

James R. Barth

Papers

Industrial banks: Challenging the traditional separation of commerce and banking

How Does a Borrower's Education Influence Demand for Peer-to-Peer Funding? New Evidence from China

Bank Regulation and Supervision in 180 Countries from 1999 to 2011

Inverted Yield Curves And Financial Institutions

Opportunity zones: Do tax benefits go to the most distressed communities?