More Bankers, More Growth? Evidence from OECD Countries

In this paper, we reexamine empirically the finance/growth nexus. We argue that financial deepening should not only be assessed with familiar measures of financial activities outputs (e.g. credit volume), but also through its inputs (e.g. the relative number of employees in the financial industry) or the efficiency of the financial intermediation process (measured in this paper by the ratio credit volume to number of employees). Overall, our study confirms the absence of a positive relationship between financial deepening and economic growth for OECD countries over the last forty years.