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et al. (2020), Rousseau and Xiao (2020), and Demetriades et al. (2020)), who also support the role of formal finance in China using different datasets and methods, show that the Allen et al. (2020) conjectures are being very much a minority view. Our paper therefore shifts the balance of evidence away from the view that formal finance played little role in financing Chinese economic growth. We contribute to the debate on formal and informal finance by using China’s publicly available macro data, employing a set of new perspectives. First, inspired by the classification in Ayyagari et al. (2020) and Allen et al. (2020), we study the impact of formal and informal finance on growth by exploiting heterogeneity between bank and non bank financial institutions. Ayyagari et al. (2020) separate bank finance which includes local mercial banks and foreign mercial banks, from informal finance which includes financing from informal sources such as nonbank financial Allen etal. (2020) also distinguishes financing sources from two groups, bank finance and self fund raising, that includes all other sources such as retained earnings, informal sources, loans from family and friends, trade credit, investment funds, equity and the other category. In either way of classification, these two studies include the nonbank financial institutions as part of informal finance and thus argue that nonbank financial institutions are clearly different from formal However, unlike their counterparts that are informal under mon law, nonbank financial institutions under China’s law actually operate more as contractual 3 arrangements. Moreover, like formal financial institutions such as banks, non bank financial institutions are also supervised by the Chinese central bank. These facts suggest that though Chinese nonbank financial institutions may belong to informal finance, they actually have characteristics from the formal sector and are in this respect parable to banks. The uniqueness of China’s nonbank financial institutions therefore allows our study of the heterogeneity between those two types of financial institutions to gain further insights on whether the formal or the informal financial sector leads to growth in China, helping to shed light on the difference in results between Allen et al. (2020) and Ayyagari et al. (2020). Clearly distinguishing nonbank financial institutions from banks in our study has several other merits. First, we add to previous studies employing macro data often consider only banks, as they dominate the Chinese financial sector. Nonbank financial institutions such as rural and urban credit cooperatives, trust and investment panies, and financial panies have been installed as reactions to developments in the formal banking system (see . Laurenceson and Chai (2020), and Kumar et al. (1997)). Second, while cross country differences, such as political and cultural variations as well as heterogeneity in accounting standards, make it difficult to directly pare Chinese banks with their international coun