Book Description

This dissertation presents three essays on the financial system, inflation, and growth. The first essay investigates the relationships between financial development, inflation, and economic growth. The cross-section analysis finds that the relationship between inflation and financial development is negative and nonlinear. The time series analysis by stage of inflation crisis finds that further increases in inflation have negative effects on financial development and growth in the beginning of the inflation crisis, while these relationships vanish at the closing stage of the crisis. Thus, these relationships depend on the stage of inflation. This is an advantage in this study, since use of cross-section data can not analyze the relationship between the stage of inflation and financial development. It is also found that, despite during the crises, if the roles of loans to the private sector and of loans by commercial bank can be established, higher growth is occurred. The second essay examines the hypotheses concerning the effects of money on real output using long, low frequency data for Argentina and Brazil. The annual data for Argentina are from 1884 to 1996 and for Brazil are from 1912 to 1995. Study of these countries is particularly interesting, since over the last century their experience has included extended periods of low inflation, decades of high inflation, and periods of hyperinflation. It is found that a rise in money growth is associated with a decline in output in both countries--the opposite of the Tobin effect. The introduction of intercept dummy variables to capture periods of bank insolvencies in Argentina and Brazil indicated that such episodes have a distinct and negative influence on output that is not captured by changes in the growth rate of the money aggregates. The third essay applies an ARFIMA model to investigate long-run neutrality and long-run superneutrality with monthly data including hyperinflation periods in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. It is found that industrial production series in Argentina and Brazil are fractionally integrated processes as well as three alternative monetary aggregates in Argentina and Peru. Furthermore, in an ARFIMA framework for test of long-run neutrality, the results suggest that long-run neutrality of money holds in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. Moreover, Peruvian data support long-run superneutrality in the ARFIMA framework.