Stock Market Development and Economic Growth

financial markets development, economic growth, economic development, stock markets development

Stock Market Development and Economic Growth: A Matter of Information Dynamics

The aim of this paper is to provide further insights into the linkages between stock market development and economic growth. When it is not possible to distinguish between investment projects with different rates of return, market valuation of those projects is an “average value” reflecting the expected return across all investment opportunities. Consequently, as in a typical lemon’s market, higher return projects are penalised since they attract lower than fair prices. This informational cost, or dilution cost, depends on the degree of informational asymmetry in the market, as well as on the type of financial contract issued by the firm to finance those projects – typically, equity or debt. On this basis, we interpret the development of stock market as the result of a change in the level of informational costs which decrease with capital accumulation and induce firms to switch from debt financing to a less costly equity financing.Credit Markets, Economic Growth, Information Asymmetries, Stock Markets

BANKRUPTCY COSTS, DILUTION COSTS AND STOCK MARKET DEVELOPMENT

-

Testing for the stability of money demand in italy: has the euro influenced the monetary transmission mechanism?

Money demand, ARDL model, Kalman filter

Financial Development and the Underground Economy

We provide a theoretical and empirical study of the relation between financial development and the size of the underground economy. In our theoretical framework agents allocate investment between a low-return technology which can be operated with internal funds, and a high-return technology which requires external finance. Firms can reduce the cost of funding by disclosing part or all of their assets and pledging them as collateral. The disclosure decision, however, also involves higher tax payments and reduces tax evasion. We show that financial development (a reduction in the cost of external finance) can reduce tax evasion and the size of the underground economy. We test the main implications of the model using Italian microeconomic data that allow us to construct a micro-based index of the underground economy. In line with the model’s predictions, we find that local financial development is associated with a smaller size of the underground economy, controlling for the potential endogeneity of financial development and other determinants of the underground economy.Underground Economy, Financial Development.

The Impact of Banking Development on the Size of the Shadow Economy

This paper employs data on 119 countries for the period 1999/2000 to 2004/2005 to examine the impact of banking development on the size of shadow economies. The main results indicate that an improvement in the development of the banking sector is associated with a smaller shadow economy in a wide cross-section of countries. In addition, both depth and efficiency of the banking sector matter equally in reducing the size of a shadow economy. These stylized results are robust under a variety of specifications and controls for simultaneity bias.Shadow Economy, Banking Development.

Living With Corruption: Threshold Effects in Red Tape and Rent Seeking

-

Financial Development, Financing Choice and Economic Growth

In an overlapping generations economy households (lenders) fund risky investment projects of firms (borrowers) by drawing up loan contracts on the basis of asymmetric information. An optimal contract entails either the issue of only debt or the issue of both debt and equity according to whether a household faces a single or a double enforcement problem as a result of its own decision about whether or not to undertake costly information acquisition. The equilibrium choice of contract depends on the state of the economy which, in turn, depends on the contracting regime. Based on this analysis, the paper provides a theory of the joint determination of real and financial development with the ability to explain both the endogenous emergence of stock markets and the complementarity between debt finance and equity finance.asymmetry of information, economic growth, financial markets, stock markets development

Poverty Traps

The understanding of why some countries fail to develop is one of the most intriguing and productive challenges for the modern theory of economic growth. Although many questions remains unanswered, the theory has gone a long way to explain and reveal many of the reasons underlying the persistence of poverty traps. Multiple causes, endogeneity and country-specific differences make it difficult to explain within a unified framework why some economies, caught in a vicious cycle, suffer from persistent underdevelopment