Finance, Inequality, and Poverty Revisited: A Threshold Model Approach

There have been significant influences of financialdevelopment on the income growth of the poor, the reduction ofincome inequality, and a decrease in the number of people wholive on less than $1 per day. These effects were explored by Beck,Demirguc-Kunt, and Levine in their Finance, Inequality, andPoverty paper that examines the income growth of the poorestquintile, overall income inequality, and the number of peopleliving on less than$1 per day. Our research derives from thispaper with the addition of quantifiable measures of financialdevelopment using threshold estimations. We further examinethreshold values using an instrumental variable estimation toaccount for endogeneity bias. The results from our cross-countryanalyses allow us to make comparisons between differentcountries regarding the necessary measure of financialdevelopment that is needed for growth in the poorest sectors ofeach economy

The Economic Impact of the Arts, Film, History and Tourism Industries in Connecticut

This report contains four ecnomic impact studies corresponding to the four divisions (arts, film, historic preservation, and tourism) of the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism that commissioned them. There is an Executive Summar, the four industry studies, and a methodological overview that includes a discussion of the overall approach, economic impact multipliers, data sources, and an explanation of the conservative nature of the studies.Arts, Film, Historic preservation, heritage, Tourism, travel, impact, Connecticut,

Nonlinearities between financial development and economic development

Both theory and available evidence accord financial development an important role in economic development. The precise nature of the relationship is as yet less well understood, and recent theoretical work suggests there may be pronounced discontinuities and nonlinearities in this relationship. Most of the available empirical research examining the relationship between financial development and economic development either only tests for linear relationships, uses ad hoc methods to test for nonlinearities, or exogenously specifies the precise nature of the nonlinearity. Further, while theory suggests a host of factors condition how financial development influences economic development, as yet only a few of these factors have been subjected to rigorous empirical test. This dissertation comprises three essays empirically probing the relationship between financial development and economic development. The first essay searches for nonlinearities in the link between financial development and economic growth. Following recent theory, it is hypothesized that the initial level of per capita income and the initial human capital level influence how financial development influences economic growth and that these effects are nonlinear and potentially exhibit pronounced discontinuities, or thresholds. ^ The second essay probes for nonlinearities in the link between financial development and economic growth after controlling for the potential endogenity problem. The third essay considers nonlinearities in the link between inflation and both of the banking finance and equity finance indicators. An innovation of the proposed research is the use of Hansen\u27s (1996, 2000) endogenous threshold methodology and Caner and Hansen (2004) instrumental variable approach to the threshold regression method. Unlike most other methodologies used to explore nonlinearities in the literature, this methodology neither requires that threshold values of mediating variables be exogenously specified nor that the functional form of the nonlinearity be specified. Further, unlike the Durlauf-Johnson Regression Tree approach (Durlauf and Johnson, 1995), Hansen\u27s methodology provides the necessary asymptotic theory to enable tests for the statistical significance of the number of thresholds. The use of these recent econometric techniques will enable a comparison between our results and the traditional cross-country approach and provide better understanding of how the relationship between financial development and economic development changes overtime.