Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments February 2002 erstellt
Description:
Using a unique firm-level survey data base covering 54 countries, Beck, Demirguc-Kunt, and Maksimovic investigate whether different financial, legal, and corruption issues that firms report as constraints actually affect their growth rates. The results show that the extent to which these factors constrain a firm's growth depends very much on its size and that it is consistently the smallest firms that are most adversely affected by all three constraints. Firm growth is more affected by reported constraints in countries with underdeveloped financial and legal systems and higher corruption. So, policy measures to improve financial and legal development and reduce corruption are well justified in promoting firm growth, particularly the development of the small and medium enterprise sector. But the evidence also shows that the intuitive descriptors of an quot;efficientquot; legal system are not correlated with the components of the general legal constraints that predict firm growth. This finding suggests that the mechanism by which the legal systems affects firm performance is not well understood. The authors' findings also provide evidence that the corruption of bank officials constrains firm growth. This quot;institutional failurequot; should be taken into account when modeling the monitoring role of financial institutions in overcoming market failures due to informational asymmetries.This paper - a product of Finance, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the link from the financial sector to economic development. The authors may be contacted at tbeckworldbank.org, ademirguckunt@worldbank.org, or vmaksimovic@rhsmith.umd.edu