A country's level of financial development and the legal environment in which financial intermediaries and markets operate critically influence economic development. In countries whose financial sectors are more fully developed and whose legal systems protect the rights of outside investors,...

A secured letter-of-credit loan allows a lender to make larger loans than would be permissible on an unsecured basis, maximizing a risky borrower's investment capital. Empirical evidence shows that secured letters of credit are used by borrowers who are informationally opaque and have higher...

Economies with better developed financial sectors have a comparative advantage in manufacturing industries. A two-sector model shows the sector with large scale economies profiting more than the other from a well-developed financial sector. In countries with higher levels of financial...

Large and foreign-owned institutions may have difficulty extending relationship loans to informationally opaque small firms. Bank distress does not appear to affect small business lending, although even small firms may react to bank distress by borrowing from multiple banks

In a large sample of East Asian nonfinancial corporations, firms using foreign currency derivatives had distinctive characteristics, such as larger size and foreign debt exposures. Unlike in studies of U.S. firms, there was only weak evidence that liquidity-constrained firms with greater growth...