An Empirical Investigation of Economic Growth,Convergence Hypothesis and Financial Development

• Main Authors: Chih-Chuan Yeh, 葉志權
• Other Authors: Ho-Chuan (River) Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95913548303368389035

博士 === 淡江大學 === 財務金融學系博士班 === 95 === This paper provides a survey and synthesis of novel econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth, convergence hypothesis and financial development. This paper is organized as follows: Chapter 1 describes a set of stylized facts concerning economic growth, convergence hypothesis and financial development. Chapter 2 describes the relationship between stock market development and econometric frameworks for growth, with a primary focus on panel data growth regressions. Chapter 1 investigates empirically the impact of financial intermediary development on convergence and whether such an impact varies according to the stage of real development. We implement this analysis through the instrumentvariable threshold regressions approach proposed by Caner and Hansen (2004) to delve with endogeneity of financial development, so as to concentrate on the causal effects of the exogenous component of financial development and uncover income threshold effects on the convergence process. Utilizing the cross-country data consisting of 61 countries averaged over the period 1960-1995, our empirical evidence shows that financial intermediary development leads to convergent rates of growth. Moreover, such convergence-enhancing effects of financial intermediation are much stronger in developing economies than industrialized ones. In other words, the lack of financial intermediaries prevents poorer countries from catching up with the richer ones, and this divergence is more prevalent for developing countries than for advanced ones. These findings are robust to alternative conditioning information sets and measures of financial intermediary development. Chapter 2 reviews, appraises and critiques theoretical and empirical research on the connections between the operation of the financial system and economic growth. Efforts to estimate the interrelationship between stock markets development and economic growth have been plagued by the reverse causation and endogeneity problem. This paper employs a simultaneous equations system to empirically investigate the causal inter-linkage between these two important variables. Identification and estimation of the structural parameters are relied on a novel identification through heteroskedasticity methodology. Using unbalanced panel data for 93 countries over the 1976-1998 period, we find a positive, bidirectional connection between economic growth and stock markets development as predicted by recent theories. Particularly, better developed stock markets induce faster economic growth and, in turn, higher economic growth facilitates the development of stock markets. The results are robust to different measures of stock markets development used, to alternative information sets conditioned, and to different econometric methods employed.