期刊名称:Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN:1830-3420
电子版ISSN:1830-3439
出版年度:2010
出版社:European Central Bank
摘要:We study how nancial market eciency aects a measure of diversication of output across industrial sectors borrowed from the portfolio allocation literature. Using data on sector-level value added for a wide cross section of countries and for various levels of disaggregation, we construct a benchmark measure of diversication as the set of allocations of aggregate output across industrial sectors which minimize the economy’s long-term volatility for a given level of long-term growth. We nd that nancial markets increase substantially the speed with which the observed sectoral allocation of output converges towards the optimally diversied benchmark. Convergence to the optimal shares of aggregate output is relatively faster for sectors that have a higher "natural" long-term risk-adjusted growth and which exhibit higher information frictions. Our results are robust to using various proxies for nancial development, to accounting for the endogeneity of nance, and to controlling for investor’s protection, contract enforcement, and barriers to entry. Crucially, the observed patterns disappear when we employ "naive" measures of diversication based on the equal spreading of output across sectors.