This paper examines how different establishments performed during the recent global financial crisis, focusing on the role of foreign ownership. The paper investigates how foreign ownership affected establishments' responses to negative economic shocks, using a cross-country panel dataset with...

Firms have various ways to cope with external risks. This paper analyzes the risk coping behavior that entails the smoothing of inputs (labor, raw materials, or capital). The theoretical framework shows that, if they face adjustment costs, firms prefer to smooth their inputs, especially if they...

Two data sets are used to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms' financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...

Using both market-based and annual report-based approaches to measure lending specialization for a broad cross-section of banks and countries over the period 2002 to 2011, this paper is the first to empirically gauge the relationship between bank lending specialization and bank performance and...

This paper introduces the Global Financial Development Database, an extensive dataset of financial system characteristics for 205 economies from 1960 to 2010. The database includes measures of (a) size of financial institutions and markets (financial depth), (b) degree to which individuals can...

This paper uses firm-level data to assess whether telecommunication services are general-purpose technologies (technologies that benefit a large segment of the economy and have long-lasting effect). It finds that only Internet services are so: firm growth and productivity are much higher when...

This paper studies how crises prompted firms to switch borrowing across markets, impacting the amount borrowed, maturity, and currency denomination at the firm and aggregate levels. Using data on worldwide debt issuance from advanced and emerging economies, the paper shows that firms shifted...

Emerging market and developing economies have experienced recurrent episodes of rapid debt accumulation over the past fifty years. This paper examines the consequences of debt accumulation using a three-pronged approach: an event study of debt accumulation episodes in 100 emerging market and...

In spite of the United States' recovery, most Caribbean nations are still struggling in the aftermath of the 2007?08 global financial crisis. This paper examines this slow growth recovery through the analysis of how the Caribbean's growth relates to that of key drivers of the global economy. The...