Forbes and Warnock (2012) identify episodes of extreme capital flow movements--surges, stops, flight, and retrenchment--and find that global factors, especially global risk, are significantly associated with extreme capital flow episodes whereas domestic macroeconomic characteristics and capital...

Despite the disappearance of formal barriers to international investment across countries, we find that the average home bias of U.S. investors towards the 46 countries with the largest equity markets did not fall from 1994 to 2004 when countries are equally weighted but fell when countries are...

As barriers to international investment fall and technology improves, the cost advantages for a firm's securities to trade publicly in the country in which that firm is located and for that country to have a market for publicly traded securities distinct from the capital markets of other...

We analyze the development of 49 local bond markets. Our main finding is that policies and laws matter: Countries with stable inflation rates and strong creditor rights have more developed local bond markets and rely less on foreign-currency-denominated bonds. The results suggest that "original...

This paper investigates Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deregistrations by foreign firms from the time the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed in 2002 through 2008. We test two theories, the bonding theory and the loss of competitiveness theory, to understand why foreign firms leave...

This paper investigates how public equity issuance is related to stock market liquidity. Using quarterly data on IPOs and SEOs in 36 countries over the period 1995-2008, we show that equity issuance is significantly and positively related to contemporaneous and lagged innovations in aggregate...

Though overall bank performance from July 2007 to December 2008 was the worst since at least the Great Depression, there is significant variation in the cross-section of stock returns of large banks across the world during that period. We use this variation to evaluate the importance of factors...

We assess the development of local currency bond markets in emerging market economies (EMEs). Supported by policies and laws that helped to improve macroeconomic stability and creditor rights, many local currency EME bond markets have grown substantially over the past decade and have also...

We propose a theory of regulatory arbitrage by banks and test it using trust preferred securities (TPS) issuance. From 1996 to 2007, U.S. banks in the aggregate increased their regulatory capital through issuance of TPS while their net issuance of common stock was negative due to repurchases. We...

Liquidity production is a central role of banks. We show that, under idealized conditions, high leverage is optimal for banks when there is a market premium for (socially valuable) liquid financial claims and no deviations from Modigliani and Miller (1958) due to agency problems, deposit...