This paper re-examines the empirical relationship between financial and economic development while (i) taking into account their dynamics and (ii) differentiating between stock market and banking sector development. We study the cointegration and causality between finance and growth for 22 advanced economies. Our time series analysis suggests that causality patterns depend on whether countries’ financial development stems from the stock market or the banking sector. We show that stock market development tends to cause economic development, while a reverse causality is mostly present between banking sector development and output growth. These findings indicate that the direction of causality between finance and growth is likely to be different at high levels of development.

We study the effects of the US Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase programs during 2008–2014 on bank liquidity creation. Banks create liquidity when they transform the liquid reserves resulted from quantitative easing (QE) into illiquid assets. As the composition of banks’ loan portfolio affects the amount of liquidity it creates, the impact of quantitative easing on liquidity creation is not a priori clear. Using a difference-in-difference identification strategy, we find that banks more affected by the policy increased lending relative to those less affected, mainly during the first and third round of QE. However, we only find a strong effect of the policy on liquidity creation during the third round of QE. This points to a weaker impact on the real economy during the first two rounds, when more exposed banks transformed the reserves created through QE into less illiquid assets, such as real estate mortgages.

This paper investigates the role of external auditors in banking sector supervision from a theoretical, institutional and empirical perspective. We first present a simple principal-agent framework that highlights the importance of several institutional characteristics in determining the optimal involvement of external auditors in supervision. We then construct a new index that captures the degree of involvement of external auditors in the oversight of the banking sector in 115 countries. Consistent with our theoretical arguments, we find that countries that increase the role of central banks in supervision are also more likely to involve auditors, suggesting that the added complexity of a supervisory function is likely to benefit from the expertise of an external auditor. Having experienced a financial crisis is also associated with a higher use of auditors, particularly among central banks with an increasing role in supervision, which suggests some reputational concerns of the supervisor. Finally, we show that higher audit quality is associated with an increased involvement of auditors in supervision.