Do Political Institutions and Culture Jointly Matter for Financial Development? A Cross-Country Panel Investigation\

This article investigates the role of political institutions and culture in creating an efficient financial infrastructure for a country. It further delves into this relationship and addresses the question: do both types of institutions mentioned above affect financial development of a country, jointly? Our findings support the established notion in the literature that institutions matter for financial development. We show both these types of institutions - political institutions and culture - jointly promote financial development. Further, our result stresses that these two types of institutions behave as complements - the presence of efficient political institutions augment the effectiveness of culture and, thus, financial development is enhanced. Our results are robust to various proxies of institutions and alternate estimation models.