Non-linear finance-growth nexus A threshold with instrumental variable approach

This paper revisits the question of whether the finance-growth nexus varies with the stages of economic development. Using a novel threshold regression with the instrumental variables approach proposed by Caner and Hansen (2004) to the dataset used in Levine et al. (2000) we detect overwhelming evidence in support of a positive linkage between financial development and economic growth, and this positive effect is larger in the low-income countries than in the high-income ones. The data also reveal that financial development tends to have stronger impacts on capital accumulation and productivity growth in the low-income countries than in the high-income ones. The findings are robust to alternative financial development measures and conditioning information sets.