measure of financial development, Rajan and Zingales
document a significant positive coefficient on the interaction
between industry-level demand for external financing and the
country-level CIFAR index. This result supports the prediction
that the growth is disproportionately higher in industries with
a strong exogenous demand for external financing in countries
with high-quality corporate disclosure regimes, after
controlling for fixed industry and country effects. They also
find that growth in the number of new enterprises is
disproportionately high in industries with a high demand for
external financing in countries with a large CIFAR index.
Using a similar design, Carlin and Mayer (2000) find that
the growth in industry GDP and the growth in R&D spending
as a share of value-added are disproportionately higher in
industries with a high demand for external equity financing in
countries with a large CIFAR index. Together, the results of
Rajan and Zingales, and Carlin and Mayer are consistent with
high-quality disclosure regimes promoting growth and firm
entry by lowering the cost of external financing. However, as
illustrated in the exhibit, corporate disclosure can also impact
economic performance directly through the project
identification and governance channels. For example, future
research can focus on the governance channel by developing
proxies for the relative magnitude of inherent agency costs
from shareholder-manager conflicts for each industry,
regardless of where the industry is located. Measures of
economic performance for each industry within each country
can be regressed against the interaction of the inherent agency
costs for the industry and the quality of the corporate
disclosure regime in the country.
Love (2000) examines the hypothesis that financial
development affects growth by decreasing information and
contracting related imperfections in the capital markets, thus
reducing the wedge between the cost of external and internal
finance at the firm level. Estimating a structural model of
investment using firm-level data from forty countries, the
paper finds that financial development decreases the sensitivity
of investment to the availability of internal funds, which is
equivalent to a decrease in financing constraints and
improvement in capital allocation. Love’s main indicator of
financial development is an index combining measures of stock
market development with measures of financial intermediary
development. Although the paper’s main result is that this
indicator of financial development is negatively related to the
estimated measure of capital market imperfection, it is
interesting to note that the CIFAR index loads negatively over
and above the main financial development indicator, while
separate measures of the efficiency of the legal system,
corruption, and risk of expropriation do not.