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The impacts of IPO financing and monetary policy on economic growth in Bangladesh: Evidence from a dynamic assessment

Bangladesh is considered a fast-growing emerging economy and the new Asian tiger. The increasing need for capital funds in Bangladesh is largely met by banks, mainly due to the country’s underdeveloped nature of the stock market. Bank financing is assumed to be influenced by monetary policies, particularly, by bank rates adopted each year by the central bank of Bangladesh. On the other hand, while some studies stress the need for strengthening the debt and equity securities markets to support Bangladesh’s fast economic growth, debates swirl about whether or to what extent the stock market contributes to economic growth in the country. To address the understanding gap, in this paper, we examine the impact of capital financing through equity initial public offerings (IPO) and bank rate on the economic growth of Bangladesh. We use annual data from 1981 to 2019 and employ an autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) framework to examine the long-run and short-run impacts of IPO financing and bank rate on GDP growth rate. Our findings suggest the existence of a long-run cointegrating relationship between IPO financing, bank rate, and GDP growth. We find that IPO financing does not have a significant long-run impact but shows only a one-period short-run positive impact on economic growth. On the other hand, bank rate shows a long-run negative and a one-period short-run positive impact on economic growth. Findings overall suggest that IPO financing does not significantly contribute to long-run economic growth while giving only a temporary boost. Further, increases in bank rate - as one would expect - depress economic growth in the long-run, while generating herd behavior immediately. Our findings stress the need for encouraging more quality IPO issuances, increasing the issuance size, and ensuring proper utilization of the funds by IPO issuers to make the capital market a key driver of economic growth.