Home-bias Politics, Financial Deregulation and Economic Growth: A Causal Relationship

We re-examine the finance-growth nexus using the Chinese financial deregulation experience during the reform period 1981-1998. We use lagged home-bias political variables as instruments for financial deregulation. Dealing with weak instruments by LIML (limited-information maximum likelihood) estimation, we find that financial deregulation has a significant causal effect on economic growth. The result holds up when we control for conditional convergence, other growth determinants, and time and province effects.