The international transmission of shocks in the global financial system has always been an important issue for policy makers. Different types of foreign shocks have different effects and policy implications. In this paper, we examine the effects of the recent U.S. financial crisis and the...

Private placement debt issues are more effective than public bonds in resolving information asymmetries and controlling moral hazard problems. Firms that issue only private placements (non-switchers) are found to have more information problems than firms that have access to the public bond...

This paper investigates the comovements of stocks and bonds at the individual firm level. Based on a sample of 702 corporate bonds, individual stock returns and bond yield changes are found to be negatively correlated, suggesting that the comovements of individual stocks and bonds are largely...

This paper estimates the amount of tightening in bank commercial and industrial (C&I) loan rates during the financial crisis. After controlling for loan characteristics and bank fixed effects, as of 2010:Q1, the average C&I loan spread was 66 basis points or 23 percent above normal. From about...

Doubts about the accuracy with which outside investors can assess a banking firm’s value motivate many government interventions in the banking market. The recent financial crisis has reinforced concerns about the possibility that banks are unusually opaque. Yet the empirical evidence, thus...

Over the past decade, the banking industry has undergone rapid consolidation; indeed, on average, for the past three years there were more than two bank mergers every business day. Before the 1990s, most bank mergers involved banks with less than $1 billion in assets; more recently, even the...

This paper uses the stochastic econometric cost frontier approach to investigate the cost efficiency of commercial banks in Hong Kong. On average, the X-efficiency of Hong Kong banks is found to be about 16 to 30 percent of observed total costs, which is comparable to the findings in the U.S....

After controlling for loan quality, liquidity, capitalization, and output mix, per unit bank operating costs are found to vary significantly across Asian countries and over time. Further analysis reveals that the country rankings of per unit labor and physical capital costs are highly...

Under the strong-form of market discipline, publicly traded banks that have constantly available public market signals from their stock (and bond) prices would take less risk than non-publicly traded banks because counterparties, borrowers, and regulators could react to adverse public market...

This paper examines the properties of X-inefficiencies in U.S. banking firms. We find that, after controlling for scale differences, the average small size banking firm is less efficient than the aerate large firm. Smaller firms also exhibit higher variation in X-inefficiencies than their larger...