tailieunhanh - Further Evidence on the Link between Finance and Growth: An International Analysis of Community Banking and Economic Performance

The central problem of life-cycle finance is the spreading of the income from the economically productive part of an individual’s life over that person’s whole life. As with all financial problems, this task is made difficult by time and uncertainty. Merely setting aside a portion of one’s income for later use does not mean that it will be there—in real (inflation-adjusted) terms—when it is needed. No investment is riskless if the “run” is long enough. In addition, there is the ordinary risk that the realized return will be lower than the expected return. Finally, no one knows how long he or she is going to live. The. | Further Evidence on the Link between Finance and Growth An International Analysis of Community Banking and Economic Performance Allen N. Berger Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Washington DC 20551 . Wharton Financial Institutions Center Philadelphia PA 19104 . aberger@frb. gov Iftekhar Hasan Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy NY 12180 . Berkley Research Center Stern School of Business New York NY 10012 . hasan@ Leora F. Klapper Development Research Group The World Bank Washington DC 20433 . lklapper@ Forthcoming Journal of Financial Services Research 2004 The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Board the World Bank or their staffs. The authors thank our conference discussants Phil Strahan and Giovanni Dell Ariccia the editors Bob DeYoung Curt Hunter and Greg Udell the anonymous referees as well as Thorsten Beck Asli Demirgũẹ-Kunt Robert Cull Jim Hanson Patrick Honohan Paul Wachtel and other participants in the Whither the Community Bank Conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the World Bank Economists Forum for very helpful suggestions that improved the paper greatly and Nate Miller and Mingming Zhou for outstanding research assistance. Please address correspondence to Allen N. Berger Mail Stop 153 Federal Reserve Board 20th and C Streets. NW Washington DC 20551 call 202-452-2903 fax 202-452-5295 or email aberger@frb .gov. Further Evidence on the Link between Finance and Growth An International Analysis of Community Banking and Economic Performance Abstract We try to contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993-2000 on 49 nations. Data from both developed and developing nations suggest that greater market shares and efficiency ranks of .