Researchers commonly assume that business groups, a ubiquitous organizational form in emerging markets, permit affiliated firms to share risk by smoothing income flows and by reallocating money from one affiliate to another in times of distress. This view has received support in the literature...

We use a new database from fifteen emerging markets as well as from prewar and modern Japan to examine the popular view that business groups - ubiquitous in most emerging markets - facilitate risk sharing by smoothing the performance of affiliated firms. We replicate existing results on risk...

Diversified business (or corporate) groups, consisting of legally independent firms operating in multiple markets, are ubiquitous in emerging markets and even in some developed economies. The study of groups, a hybrid organizational form between firm and market, is of relevance to industrial...

This paper analyzes yield spreads on sovereign debt issued by emerging markets using modern data from the 1990s and newly-collected historical data on debt traded in London during 1870–1913, a previous “golden era” for international capital market integration. Applying several empirical...

Financial frictions have been identified as key factors affecting economic fluctuations and growth. But, can institutional reforms reduce financial frictions? Based on a canonical investment model, we consider two potential channels: (i) financial transaction costs at the firm level; and (ii)...

Using newly-constructed data covering the last decade, we document that, in most of forty markets, when added to the main index, firms’ returns experience an increase in comovement with the rest of the index, reflected in higher beta and greater explanatory power of the market return. Stock...

This paper reviews the literature on corporate groups in Japan and elsewhere, and offers a comparison of Japan's corporate groups with groups in other developed and developing countries. It then proceeds to examine the evolution of corporate groups in Japan since the mid-1970s. The main...

In this paper we provide evidence that the post-issue accounting profitability of firms underwritten by bank affiliated underwriters that are also borrowers from the same bank in the IPO (Initial Public Offerings) year is significantly better than average, but that the stock price performance of...