Using a large sample of private international bond issues, we document a substantial decline in the share of international bonds denominated in major reserve currencies over the last two decades, and an increase in bonds denominated in issuers’ home currencies. These secular trends appear to...

Modern corporate finance theory argues that although bank monitoring is beneficial to borrowers, it also allows banks to use the private information they gain through monitoring to "hold-up" borrowers for higher interest rates. In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for this information...

This paper investigates whether it is costly for nonfinancial firms to enter the public bond market, and whether firms benefit from their bond IPOs. We find that both gross spreads and ex ante credit spreads are higher for IPO bonds, suggesting that firms pay higher underwriting costs on their...

Using firm–level data, we find that the presence of foreign firms in China is positively associated with the performance of domestically owned private firms but is negatively associated with the performance of state–owned enterprises (SOEs). In particular, we find: (1) the presence of...

Analyzing university faculty and graduate student data for the top-ten U.S. economics departments between 1987 and 2007, we find that there are persistent differences in gender composition for both faculty and graduate students across institutions and that the share of female faculty and the...

Greater financial integration between core and peripheral EMU members had an effect on both sets of countries. Lower interest rates allowed peripheral countries to run bigger deficits, which inflated their economies by allowing credit booms. Core EMU countries took on extra foreign leverage to...

Regional inequality in China appears to be persistent and even growing in the last two decades. We study potential explanations for this phenomenon. After making adjustments for the difference in the cost of living across provinces, we find that some of the inequality in real wages could be...

We argue that, through its effect on aggregate demand and country risk premia, sovereign debt restructuring can adversely affect the private sector's access to foreign capital markets. Using fixed effect analysis, we estimate that sovereign debt rescheduling episodes are indeed systematically...

Currency crises of the past decade highlighted the importance of balance-sheet effects of currency crises. In credit-constrained markets such effects may lead to further declines in credit. Controlling for a host of fundamentals, we find a systematic decline in foreign credit to emerging market...

Over the years, U.S. banks have increasingly relied on the bond market to finance their business. This created the potential for a link between the bond market and the corporate sector whereby borrowers, including those that do not rely on bond funding, became exposed to the conditions in the...