This paper attempts to shed some light on the role of financial sector policies in generating new knowledge, drawing on the experience of one of the fastest growing and largest developing countries. Using time series data for India over the period 1963–2005, the results indicate that interest rate restraints help generate ideas. Other financial repressionist policies, in the form of high reserve and liquidity requirements, as well as significant directed credit controls, appear to have a dampening effect on ideas production. These results lend some support to the argument that some form of financial sector reforms may help stimulate economic growth via increasing technological innovation.

This paper explores the determinants of financial development by focusing on the role played by barriers to the diffusion of financial technology. These barriers are measured using human genetic distance from the technology frontier. The results based on cross-sectional data for 123 countries suggest that genetic distance to the global frontier has an economically and statistically significant effect on financial development, in that countries that are genetically far from the technology leader tend to have lower levels of financial development. Genetic distance is found to have the largest effect, even after controlling for other determinants of financial development established in the literature. These findings indicate that cultural barriers to the diffusion of financial technology across borders impact financial development by influencing the follower countries’ ability to adopt and adapt innovations from the frontier.