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This article investigates the role of political institutions and culture in creating an efficient financial infrastructure for a country. It further delves into this relationship and addresses the question: do both types of institutions mentioned above affect financial development of a country, jointly? Our findings support the established notion in the literature that institutions matter for financial development. We show both these types of institutions – political institutions and culture – jointly promote financial development. Further, our result stresses that these two types of institutions behave as complements – the presence of efficient political institutions augment the effectiveness of culture and, thus, financial development is enhanced. Our results are robust to various proxies of institutions and alternate estimation models.