The controversy about the choice among accounting alternatives is often based on arguments suggesting heuristic behaviour by market participants and firm managers. Debates focus on whether accounting methodology systematically alters reported earnings and whether this effect may add or subtract...

This paper evaluates whether the GFC was instrumental in changing the determinants of corporate leverage in EMEs. This issue is addressed using a panel-GMM framework and quantile analysis with a database comprising more than 2,000 firms in 10 EMEs over a 19-year period. We find that, post-GFC,...

We investigate the importance of the housing-based collateral lending channel on firm borrowing, investment and employment. We focus on small firms in France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. To identify a credit supply effect, as opposed to a home-equity driven demand effect, we compare...

Despite the disappearance of formal barriers to international investment across countries, we find that the average home bias of US 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...

Why do private firms stay private? Empirical evidence on this issue is sparse, as most private firms in the US do not report their financial results. We investigate why private status matters by taking advantage of a unique dataset of large, leveraged private firms with SEC filings. Unlike a...

Why do private firms stay private? Empirical evidence on this issue is sparse, as most private firms in the US do not report their financial results. We investigate why private status matters by taking advantage of a unique dataset of large, leveraged private firms with SEC filings. Unlike a...

This study examines bank risk by investigating the equity and loan portfolio characteristics of publicly-traded bank holding companies. Unlike the pattern for non-financial firms, equity betas of large banks are two to five times greater than those of small banks. In explaining this, we note...

This paper investigates the relative role of price discovery between two long-term swap contracts that exchange U.S. dollars for Japanese yen - the cross-currency basis swap and the foreign exchange (FX) swap - using structural state space models. Our main findings are that: (i) the currency...

We find evidence that in the market for euro area sovereign credit risk, arbitrageurs engage in basis trades between credit default swap (CDS) and bond markets only when the CDS-bond basis exceeds a certain threshold. This threshold effect is likely to reflect costs that arbitrageurs face when...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the macroeconomic implications of financial imperfections. It focuses on two major channels through which financial imperfections can affect macroeconomic outcomes. The first channel, which operates through the demand side of finance...