Intermediation and Economic Integration

Essays on Financial Intermediation and Economic Linkages

My dissertation studies the impact of economic linkages among market participants on equilibrium outcomes such as asset prices and returns as well as investors’ welfare. The first essay—titled “Inter-firm Relationships and Asset Prices”—studies the asset pricing properties that stem from the propagation of shocks within a network economy and the extent to which such a propagation mechanism quan...

Financial Intermediation, the Environment, and Economic Growth

Relationship between Economic Integration and Business

One of the basic tenets in recent international trade literature is about the effect of trade integration on business cycle synchronization (BCS) among trading countries. The objective of this paper is to explore the main determinants of business cycle synchronization, with emphasis on trade integration. To this end, we have specified two simultaneous regression equations which were estimated b...

Development of Financial Intermediation and Economic Growth Chinese Experience

Using Chinese provincial data from 1985 to 1998 and applying recent GMM techniques developed for dynamic panels, this paper examines how the development of financial intermediation influences China’s economic growth during the post-1978 reform period. Our econometric results show that China’s financial intermediation development contributes to its rapid economic growth through two channels: the...

Financial Intermediation and Economic Development: A Quantitative Assessment∗

We present a model in which the importance of financial intermediation for economic development can be measured. We generate financial differences by varying the degree to which contracts can be enforced. Economies where enforcement is poor direct less capital to the production sector, and employ less efficient technologies. Calibrated simulations reveal that the resulting effect on output is i...