Vaona, Andrea Patuelli, Roberto 2008-05-13 In this paper, we show that the regional finance-growth nexus in Italy is robust to a series of innovations with respect to the existing literature on the topic. We use finer measures of economic and financial development, as well as instruments with a deeper economic content. We rely on state-of-the-art cross-sectional and panel estimation methods, and we offer a thorough investigation of the nonlinearities in the relation between finance and growth. Our results show that, while local financial development is a key factor for economic growth, in regions with inefficient courts more credit might translate into reduced growth due to opportunistic behaviour and the consequent misallocation of funds. application/pdf https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1317883 https://susi.usi.ch/global/documents/317883 https://susi.usi.ch/documents/317883/files/wp0805.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/ark/12658/srd1317883 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess License undefined Finance growth regions Italy cross-section analysis panel data analysis info:eu-repo/classification/udc/33 New empirical evidence on local financial development and growth http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_816b