4.3. Financial development measures
In our main tests, we use stock market and banking development to proxy for financial development.
Following the conventional literature (e.g., Demirguc-Kunt and Levine, 1996; Wurgler, 2000), we adopt both
value-based and liquidity-based measures for stock market development, that is: (i) the ratio of total market
value of all shares listed on SHSE and SZSE at the end of a year to GDP in the same year, denoted by
MKTCAP and (ii) the ratio of the total market value of all shares traded in a year to GDP in the same year,
denoted by MKTLIQ. We also use the average of MKTCAP and MKTLIQ, denoted by FINAVG as an alternative
measure. Following Wurgler (2000) and other financial development studies, we measure banking
development as the ratio of annual total bank loans to GDP, denoted by CREDIT. We calculate these measures
for each province or a province-level municipality where banks and listed firms are headquartered at the
fiscal year end (Hasan et al., 2009; Ayyagari et al., 2010). Appendix C reports the mean values of these stock
market and banking development measures by year and by province.