In this paper, I provide a specific channel through which financial development helps economic growth: by reducing the incidence of crises and making them less severe. To support this, I examine the various links among financial markets development, financial crisis, and GDP growth rate. My empirical estimates, using cross-country data from 1980 to 2007, show a statistically significant and economically relevant effect among these variables: countries with better local financial markets can largely decrease the frequency of occurrence of financial crisis, and that efficient banking systems can alleviate the adverse impact of banking crisis on output lost for the long-run, while better stock market can do it for the short-run. |