This paper examines the gender diversity in corporate boardrooms in Asia and the Pacific and how the diversity affects corporate performance. We find that boardroom gender diversity is low in Asia with 7.5% female representation on average in 2012, but showing a 1.8% improvement in 2013. The...

Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is motivated by increasing shareholder value through improved corporate governance. Therefore, stronger corporate governance can reduce the returns from M&A activity, including M&A foreign direct investment (FDI). This, in turn, can reduce the returns from...

Merger and acquisition (M&A) is a mechanism for promoting corporate governance suggesting that an improvement in overall corporate governance may have a negative effect on M&A activity. Since M&A foreign direct investment (FDI) is a cross-border variant of M&A, stronger corporate governance may...

Can a government credibly promise not to bailout firms whose failure would have major negative systemic consequences? Our analysis of the Republic of Korea's 1997–1999 crisis, suggests an answer: No. Despite a general "no bailout" policy during the crisis, the largest Korean corporate groups...

This study investigated environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and its financial impacts across 38 economies from 2013 to 2022, with a special focus on firms in Asia. The main findings are as follows. First, notable disparities in ESG assessments were found across major rating...

This report investigates the impact of digitalization on firm-level performance using survey data from 681 digital entrepreneurs across six Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. Results show that the reliance of the business on select digital applications and the...

The global economy is threatened with a deep and prolonged recession as a consequence of the financial meltdown that began with the housing price crisis in the United States. The financial implications of the global macroeconomic imbalances that have persisted and enabled the housing bubble to...

Using the "trilemma indexes" developed by Aizenman et al. (2008) that measure the extent of achievement in each of the three policy goals in the trilemma - monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial openness - this paper examines how policy configurations affect macroeconomic...

A key legacy of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 is a sustained drop-off in the investment rates of East Asian countries that were hardest hit by the crisis. We first review the stylized facts of investment in those countries, and then explore and evaluate the various possible...

The global economic crisis has revealed that growth in East Asia is highly vulnerable to slowdown in exports to major advanced economies. This paper shows that in precrisis years, at least one third of growth in the Peoples Republic of China was due to exports, and this proportion was even...