The recent financial crisis has shown that financial frictions such as asset bubbles and liquidity spirals have important consequences not only for the financial sector, but also more generally for the macro economy. It forces economists to reevaluate firmly held beliefs about market efficiency, as well as convictions about the appropriate regulation of financial markets and approaches to macro...

Unlike conventional wisdom, I find more constrained firms have significantly higher innovative efficiency (IE) measured by patent citations (or counts) per dollar of R&D (research and development). This constraints-IE relation is robust to measures of financial constraints, measures of IE, and different sets of control variables. Furthermore, this effect exists only among firms with strong mana...

mprovements in information processing technology and deregulation, among other forces, are profoundly transforming the financial sector of the United States and other advanced economies. Many of these changes are likely to improve the efficiency of financial intermediation, in the sense that the dispersion of valuations of claims to future payments across different individuals and institutions ...

IMF policies have been widely criticized in the aftermath of the Asian crisis. Key critics questioned the appropriateness and the sequencing of financial liberalization programs which, along with insufficient monitoring and inadequate prudential regulations, left the financial sectors of the affected countries highly leveraged and exposed. This paper examines the impacts of similar reforms on t...

Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) in a sample of commercial banks from 107 countries for the period 1996-2003, we obtain a mean cost efficiency score of 0,84, which supports the evidence found in other works, suggesting an improvement of efficiency scores over the ones obtained in the previous decade. Adding some data on the financial information framework (Bank Regulation and supervisio...

The relationship between financial development and economic growth is the crucial issues which could grab economists and policy makers' attention to it. Financial market plays an essential role on each economy, because it conducts funds to those individuals or firms which have productive investment opportunities. If the financial system does not perform this role efficiently, the economic effic...