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We investigate how communication within banks affects small business lending. Using travel times between a bank’s headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times—the introduction of new airline routes—to evaluate the impact of within-bank communication costs on small business loans. We find that reducing headquarters-branch travel time boosts small business lending in the branch’s county. Several extensions suggest that new airline routes facilitate in-person communications that boost small-firm lending.

We evaluate the impact of the African slave trade between 1400 and 1900 on modern household finance. Exploiting cross-country and cross-ethnic group differences in the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa, we find that slave exports during the 1400–1900 period are negatively associated with current measures of household (a) access to financial services, (b) access to credit, (c) use of mobile finance and (d) trust in financial institutions, suggesting that the slave trade has had an enduring, deleterious effect on household finance.

A large theoretical literature asserts that standard-essential patents (SEPs) allow their owners to “hold up” innovation by charging fees that exceed their incremental contribution to a final product. We evaluate two central, interrelated predictions of this SEP holdup hypothesis: (1) SEP-reliant industries should experience more stagnant quality-adjusted prices than non-SEP-reliant industries; and (2) court decisions that reduce the excessive power of SEP holders should accelerate innovation in SEP-reliant industries. We find no empirical support for either prediction. Indeed, SEP-reliant industries have the fastest quality-adjusted price declines in the U.S. economy.

Why does a country's legal origin influence its firms' access to finance? Using data from over 4,000 firms in 38 countries, the authors show that firms in countries with French legal origin face significantly higher obstacles in accessing external finance than firms in common law countries. Next, their results indicate that French legal origin countries tend to have (1) less adaptable legal systems, as defined by the degree to which case law and principles of equity rather than simply statutory law are accepted foundations of legal decisions, and (2) less politically independent judiciaries, as defined by the degree of tenure of supreme court judges and their jurisdiction over cases involving the government. Finally, the authors find that the adaptability of a country's legal system is more important for explaining the obstacles that firms face in contracting for external finance than the political independence of the judiciary. So, they distinguish among competing explanations of why law matters for financial development by empirically documenting the links running from international differences in legal origin to the operation of the financial system at the firm level.

We document five stylized facts of economic growth. (1) The "residual" rather than factor accumulation accounts for most of the income and growth differences across nations. (2) Income diverges over the long run. (3) Factor accumulation is persistent while growth is not persistent and the growth path of countries exhibits remarkable variation across countries. (4) Economic activity is highly concentrated, with all factors of production flowing to the richest areas. (5) National policies closely associated with long-run economic growth rates. We argue that these facts do not support models with diminishing returns, constant returns to scale, some fixed factor of production, and that highlight the role of factor accumulation. Empirical work, however, does not yet decisively distinguish among the different theoretical conceptions of "total factor productivity growth." Economists should devote more effort towards modeling and quantifying total factor productivity.

This article introduces a new database of indicators of financial structure and financial development across countries and over time. The database is unique in that it combines a wide variety of indicators that measure the size, activity, and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets. It improves on previous efforts by presenting data on the public share of commercial banks, introducing indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial institutions, and constructing measures of the size of bond and primary equity markets. This article introduces a new database, the first to provide comprehensive measures of the development, structure, and performance of the financial sector. This database is the first to define and construct indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial intermediaries, such as insurance companies, pension funds, and non-deposit money banks. It is also the first to include indicators of the size of primary equity markets and primary and secondary bond markets. In constructing the database, authors carefully deflate measures and match stock and flow variables.

There is systematic contagion across national borders. Favorable or unfavorable growth performance of one's neighbors tends to influence one's own long-run growth rate. Policy choices are also contagious across borders. While improving policies alone boosts growth substantially, the growth effects are much larger if neighboring countries act together. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.

Explaining cross-country differences in growth rates requires not only an understanding of the link between growth and public policies, but also an understanding of why countries choose different public policies. This paper shows that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth is associated with low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, high government deficits, and insufficient infrastructure. Africa's high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics.

The authors empirically evaluate the relationship between stock market development and long-term growth. The data suggest that stock market development is positively associated with economic growth. Moreover, instrumental variables procedures indicate a strong connection between the predetermined component in the long run. While cross-country regressions imply a strong link between stock market development and economic growth, the results should be viewed as suggestive partial correlations that stimulate additional research rather than as conclusive findings. Careful case studies might help identify causal relationships and further research could be done on the time-series property of such relationships.

The research presented here focuses on four issues. First, it constructs more measures or criteria of stock market development than any previous study. It compares liquidity, concentration, volatility, institutional development, and international integration across forty-four industrial and developing countries from 1976 to 1993. Besides identifying general characteristics of these measures and defining stock market development empirically, these data facilitate further research into the relationship between stock market development and financial intermediaries, corporate finance decisions, and economic growth. These measures, ranked for each country, can be used for inter country comparisons of the level of stock market development. In addition, the data provide a basis for gauging the success of capital market development projects using objective criteria. Second, with these new data the research investigates the relationships between stock markets and financial intermediaries. Third, the research analyzes the relationship between stock market development and long-run economic growth. Fourth, the research studies the ties between stock market development and financing choices of firms. This overview puts this research in context and reviews the main results of the study. Section I provides a brief review of the role of stock markets in economic development and documents the evolution of debt and equity markets during the growth process. Section II defines stock market development and presents summary data on the development of financial intermediaries and stock markets. Section III presents evidence on the effect of stock market development on economic growth. Section IV summarizes the empirical results on how stock market development affects firm financing decisions. Section V concludes by discussing policy implications.

Financial reforms initiated in most transitional socialist economies do not yet adequately provide many of the financial services associated with market-oriented financial systems. Such services - mobilizing resources, selecting firms and allocating capital, monitoring firm managers, and facilitating the management of transactions and risk - are a necessary condition for economic reform to improve living standards. This article envisages four central strategies to guide reforms of the financial sector: (a) building an infrastructure based on clear and enforceable property rights, modern accounting and auditing standards, reliable payments systems, sound prudential and enforcement regulations, and professionals trained in finance; (b) ending the shell game of trying to hide the losses of state-owned enterprises, and separating government decisions to finance priority firms from the allocation decisions of independent financial institutions; (c) privatizing some financial institutions early - although not necessarily precipitously - in concert with the privatization of firms and supervisory capabilities, meanwhile cleaning up bank loans to maximize the changes that firms and banks will succeed as private entities; and (d) improving the tax system and stressing a prudent interest rate policy to reduce uncertainty, distortions, and excessive repression of the financial sector.