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Expanding access to financial services holds the promise to help reduce poverty and foster economic development. However, little is still known about the determinants of the outreach of financial systems across countries. Our study is the first attempt to employ a large panel of countries, several indicators of financial inclusion and a comprehensive set of bank competition measures to study the role of banking system structure as a determinant of cross-country variability in financial outreach for households. We use panel data from 83 countries over a 10-year period to estimate models with both country and time fixed effects. We find that greater banking industry concentration is associated with more access to deposit accounts and loans, provided that the market power of banks is limited. We find evidence that countries in which regulations allow banks to engage in a broader scope of activities are also characterized by greater financial inclusion. Our results are robust to changes in sample, data, and estimation strategy and suggest that the degree of competition is an important aspect of inclusive financial sectors.JEL Codes: G21, L11, O16

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We study determinants of financial inclusion for individuals with a refugee background (refugees) from over 30 countries residing in Utica, New York. We find that greater financial inclusion is associated with refugees who are male, more educated, employed, richer, older at time of migration, have better language skills, and have lived in the country longer. Financial inclusion also increases with the degree to which refugees trust financial institutions and decreases with the degree to which refugees' close friends are from the same ethnic group. Country of origin, religious affiliation, and religiosity are strong predictors in many specifications.

We study determinants of happiness—a subjective measure of wellbeing—for roughly 600 refugees from over 30 different countries currently residing in Utica, NY. For refugees from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia and Southeast Asia, having many friends from one’s own ethnic group is strongly positively correlated with happiness in Utica, while, for African refugees, English-language skills are a strong determinant of happiness with living in their local area. Income is only modestly related to the happiness of refugees in general, though the results vary by group. We do find strong evidence that those with children are happier than those without. These last two results represent departures from much of the broader literature on happiness in the United States.