The Origins of Financial Development: How the African Slave Trade Continues to Influence Modern Finance / Ross Levine, Chen Lin, Wensi Xie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levine, Ross.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lin, Chen.

Xie, Wensi.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23800.

NBER working paper series no. w23800

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Origins of Financial Development

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

We assess how the African slave trade--which had enduring effects on social cohesion--continues to influence financial systems. After showing that the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa during the 1400 - 1900 period helps account for overall financial development, household access to credit, and firm access to finance, we evaluate three potential mechanisms linking the slave trade to modern finance--information sharing institutions, trust in financial institutions, and the quality of legal institutions. We discover that the slave trade is strongly, negatively related to the information sharing and trust mechanisms but not to the legal mechanism.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2017.