IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17565.html

From Financial Development to Informality: A Causal Link

Author

Listed:
  • Capasso, Salvatore
  • Ohnsorge, Franziska
  • Yu, Shu

Abstract

Financial development reduces the cost of accessing external financing and thus incentivizes investment in higher-productivity projects that allow firms to expand to the scale needed to operate in the formal economy. It also encourages participants of the informal sector to join the formal sector to gain access to credit and other financial services. This paper documents two findings. First, countries with less pervasive informality are associated with greater financial development. Second, the impact of financial development, and especially banking sector development, on informality is causal. This causal link is established using a novel instrumental variable for domestic financial development: financial development in other (neighboring) countries. The causal link between informality and financial development is stronger in countries with greater trade openness and capital account openness. The findings are robust to alternative specifications.

Suggested Citation

  • Capasso, Salvatore & Ohnsorge, Franziska & Yu, Shu, 2022. "From Financial Development to Informality: A Causal Link," CEPR Discussion Papers 17565, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17565
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17565
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Ridwan, Lanre Ibrahim & Ajide, Kazeem Bello & Cifuentes-Faura, Javier & Al-Faryan, Mamdouh Abdulaziz Saleh, 2024. "Shadow economy implications of financial development in Africa: Do income groups also matter?," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E26 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Informal Economy; Underground Economy
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17565. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.