Global Financial System Outcomes after 2008: A Longitudinal Comparison

This paper examines how the governance context and financial institutions may relate to different aspects of a country’s financial system before and after a crisis. Using a fixed-effects regression model for panel data and a comparative perspective, we assess longitudinal trends in the functioning of the financial systems. This modeling allows us to explore how the level of development of 139 countries and conditions related to political stability, regulatory quality, and the rule of law, may have influenced financial system outcomes. We measure financial system outcomes across four dimensions: financial depth, efficiency, stability, and access. Our findings suggest that the explanatory variables had limited statistical significance on the proxy measures of financial system outcomes. Furthermore, the relationships were not consistent across all financial system outcome variables. These results suggest that political stability and the rule of law do influence depth and efficiency, respectively, as proxy indicators of financial system outcomes.