Resolving the African Financial Development Gap: Cross-Country Comparisons and a Within-Country Study of Kenya

Franklin Allen, Elena Carletti, Robert Cull, Jun Qian, Lemma Senbet, Patricio Valenzuela

NBER Working Paper No. 18013
Issued in April 2012

---- Acknowledgments ----

We thank the Financial Sector Deepening Trust Kenya (FSD Kenya), and in particular David Ferrand, for providing the household surveys, and Samuel Makome and John Staley for providing information on Equity Bank. We appreciate helpful comments from Patrick Alila, Meghana Ayyagari, Thorsten Beck, Shawn Cole, Sankar De, Marcella Lucchetta, Randall Morck, Chukwuemeka Okoye, Daniel Sarpong, Moses Sichei, Philip Strahan, and seminar/session participants at Harvard Business School, Wesleyan University, the ERD Workshop in Accra, the Financial Intermediation Research Society meetings in Prague, the NBER African Successes 2011 conference in Zanzibar, and the Summer Research Conference at the Indian School of Business. We are grateful to Giulia La Mattina, Sailu Li, and Mircea Trandafir for excellent research assistance, and NBER and the authors' respective institutions for financial support. We are responsible for all the remaining errors. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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