This paper examines the hypothesis that non-U.S. firms cross-list in the United States to increase protection of their minority shareholders. Cross-listing on an organized exchange (NYSE or Nasdaq) in the U.S. subjects a non-U.S. firm to a number of provisions of U.S. securities law and requires...

Financial markets are increasingly integrated globally. We examine the extent to which firms from different countries rely on alternative sources of capital, the locations where they raise capital, and the factors that affect these choices. During the 1990-2001 period, firms raised about $25.9...

This paper examines the extent to which investment financing and market-timing explanations motivate public equity offers. We consider a sample of 16,958 initial public offerings and 12,373 seasoned equity offerings from 38 countries between 1990 and 2003. We provide estimates of the change in...

Newly developed long historical time series on public debt, along with modern data on external debts, allow a deeper analysis of the cycles underlying serial debt and banking crises. The evidence confirms a strong link between banking crises and sovereign default across the economic history of...

Despite the fact that one-third of worldwide mergers involve firms from different countries, the vast majority of the academic literature on mergers studies domestic mergers. What little has been written about cross-border mergers has focused on public firms, usually from the United States. Yet,...

There is a rich scholarly literature on sovereign default on external debt. Comparatively little is known about sovereign defaults on domestic debt. Even today, cross-country data on domestic public debt remains curiously exotic, particularly prior to the 1980s. We have filled this gap in the...

This paper uses a data set of over two hundred years of sovereign debt, banking and inflation crises to explore the question of how long it takes a country to "graduate" from the typical pattern of serial crisis that most emerging markets experience. We find that for default and inflation...

The historical frequency of banking crises is quite similar in high- and middle-to-low-income countries, with quantitative and qualitative parallels in both the run-ups and the aftermath. We establish these regularities using a unique dataset spanning from Denmark's financial panic during the...

The literature on the benefits and costs of financial globalization for developing countries has exploded in recent years, but along many disparate channels with a variety of apparently conflicting results. We attempt to provide a unified conceptual framework for organizing this vast and growing...