Firms are increasingly resorting to private placements in recent years, yet there is no published study of emerging markets. There is a unique opportunity to study this behavior during a severe financial crisis, when firms resorted to private placements to recover financially distressed firms....

We find that Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that performed poorly before the global financial crisis performed better during the crisis, especially when they relied on bank debt. This suggests that state ownership mitigates financial constraints during times of financial crisis. Large...