Assessing credit riskiness around the world

Abstract

During the last few decades, the theoretical literature highlighting the importance of institutional frameworks on economic performance has exhibited much growth. Furthermore, given that modern advancements have allowed the collection of panel institutional data to become a more reliable procedure, a growing body of empirical research examining several of these theoretical claims has recently begun to flourish. This new empirical literature has given much attention to studying the connection between institutions and economic growth; however, the empirical connection between institutional development and several other important measures of economic performance remains largely unexplored. This thesis partially alleviates this insufficiency by presenting the first empirical study on the relationship between institutional development and private credit riskiness around the world. The analysis consists of applying a variety of model specifications to a select group of panel datasets on institutions. The results obtained suggest that, on average, a higher level of institutional development is associated with interest rate reductions that may, in turn, be due to lower levels of credit riskiness. Moreover, these results appear to be very robust to a wide array of sensitivity tests.