چه کسی از توسعه مالی سود می برد؟ روش های جدید، شواهد جدید

This paper takes a fresh look at the impact of financial development on economic growth by using recently developed kernel methods that allow for heterogeneity in partial effects, nonlinearities and endogenous regressors. Our results suggest that while the positive impact of financial development on growth has increased over time, it is also highly nonlinear with more developed nations benefiting while low-income countries do not benefit at all. We also conduct a novel policy analysis that confirms these statistical findings. In sum, this set of results contributes to the ongoing policy debate as to whether low-income nations should scale up financial reforms.

Empirical evidence indicating that the development of the financial sector of a country greatly facilitates its economic growth is abundant (e.g., King and Levine, 1993a and King and Levine, 1993b; Jayarathe and Strahan, 1996, Demirgüç-Kunt and Maksimovic, 1998, Rajan and Zingales, 1998 and Carlin and Meyer, 2003). The broad consensus emerging from the vast amount of work is that improving the operating financial environment and mitigating financial regulations can result in higher growth (see e.g., Levine, 2005). However, many countries display underdeveloped financial sectors (Rajan and Zinagles, 2003). In our study of how financial development affects economic growth, we address many of the criticisms commonly placed on growth models and plan to provide a robust perspective. Moreover, while many of our key results can be linked to theoretical models explicating a positive link between the level of financial development and economic growth, we uncover an ambiguous effect for countries with limited financial development, suggesting a threshold type effect similar to that found in Aghion et al. (2005).3

This paper has shed new light on the impact of financial development on economic growth using new methods and measures of financial development. Specifically, it makes two contributions: first, we uncover a highly nonlinear relationship between finance and growth that is masked by the linear, parametric methodology employed by most existing studies. Using recently developed nonparametric methods, we show that although the relationship is significantly positive and becoming stronger across time for middle- and high-income countries, it is non-existent or plays only a small role in determining growth in low-income countries.