اندازه گیری جدیدی از توسعه مالی: تئوری منجر به اقدام می شود

This study presents a new measure of financial development that is directly derived from theory. Our measure, the Marginal Utilization of Debt (hereafter, MUD) comes from the seminal work of Myers (1984), Myers and Majluf (1984) and Shyam-Sunder and Myers (1999). Further, it is directly related to the development facts of Gurley and Shaw (1955). MUD is a global measure that reflects conditions in both debt and equity markets. It varies enormously across nations; from 0.23 in Australia at one extreme to 0.96 in Turkey at the other. Cross‐country variations in MUD are not random; they are related to special‐purpose measures of debt and equity market advancement from the financial development literature. Richer, more advanced nations have smaller average MUDs. We argue that the MUD may be useful for a variety of purposes and provide three example applications.

We present a new measure of financial development, the Marginal Utilization of Debt (hereafter, MUD). This measure is directly derived from theory, has many applications, and has some unique attributes. It is beautifully consistent with the Gurley and Shaw (1955) development facts, and can turn discrete indicators into continuous variables. A noted empirical researcher in financial development, Ross Levine, points out “…… one problem plaguing the entire study of finance and growth pertains to the proxies for financial development. Theory suggests that financial systems influence growth by easing information and transactions costs and thereby improving resource mobilization, and financial exchanges. Too frequently empirical measures of financial development do not directly measure these financial functions.” ( Levine, 2005, p. 922). Our work seeks directly to fill the void noted by Levine (2005), and focuses on the role of information and transaction costs in financial markets.

Before proceeding to the next section, we briefly summarize results obtained so far. The main point of this section was to show that the MUD varies enormously across countries; and further, that such variation is partly because it depends on market-specific measures of the development of both debt and equity markets. In all tests we find that widely employed indicators of equity (debt) market development are systematically associated with lower (higher) MUDs. MUD is larger when banks or private debt markets are important, and smaller when stock markets are large and actively traded. The MUD is systematically smaller when shareholders’ rights are strong, in countries with British-based legal systems, and in countries with market based financial systems. All of these findings are consistent with the theory, and provide evidence that MUD is a global measure of financial development.