Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments January 8, 2007 erstellt
Beschreibung:
Rajan amp; Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors' Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about how to obtain representative values of DEF by sector and about why these values differ between sectors have been used widely to show that sectors benefit unequally from a country's level of financial development. However, the assumptions as such have not been examined. The present study, conducted with cyclically adjusted annual DEF measures, attempts to do so using U.S. industry data for 1977-1997 aggregated by sector. The key findings are that structural/technological variables have low explanatory power for DEF and that the DEF figures calculated from micro data do not correspond closely to what is obtained from aggregate data. Hence assumptions crucial for RZ's argumentation have not been validated