This paper is intended as a survey of the effects of taxation and asymmetric information on the financing choice of the firm. The literature on taxation posits a straightforward relationship between the pretax cost of funds and the required return on an investment project to cover the cost of...

The authors investigate capital structures in a sample of the largest publicly traded firms in ten developing countries - Brazil, India, Jordan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey, and Zimbabwe - for 1980 - 91. The firms in the sample are smaller than comparable...

It has been widely recognized that both country-specific and global factors matter in explaining capital flows. The author presents an empirical framework that disentangles the relative weight of country-specific and global factors in determining capital flows. In essence, his approach first...

The author uses panel data on 394 firms in 13 developing countries for the years 1988-98 to learn whether financial liberalization relaxes financing constraints on firms. He finds that liberalization affects small and large firms differently. Small firms are financially constrained before...

The 1990s brought developing countries the heaviest private capital flows since the early 1980s, says the author - mainly bond and equity financing, rather than medium- and long-term lending by commercial banks. Flows were mainly to Asia in the first half and Latin America in the second half....

The authors study the effect of financial crises on trade credit in a sample of 890 firms in six emerging economies. They find that although provision of trade credit increases right after the crisis, it consequently collapses in the following months and years. The authors observe that firms...

The main purpose of this paper is to survey the existing literature on alternative finance (AF) and indicate the major research gaps. In this way, the survey may help to identify the factors influencing the flow of AF; provide analytical, and empirically supported underpinnings for policy work;...

This paper reviews current investment theories, recent models linking macroeconomic policies and private investment, and the effect of uncertainty and credibility on irreversible investment decisions. Empirical studies on the subject are also reviewed, and the general implications of this...

The recent Thai boom has been accomplished in an economy with considerable openness to external forces. Despite the fiscal correction achieved during 1986-89, the domestic demand expansion has made itself felt in a widening of the current account deficit. While this deficit partly reflects the...

The authors study how contagion affects bank lending spreads and fluctuations in output in Argentina. They analyze what determines bank lending spreads when verification and enforcement costs for loan contracts are high. They present estimates of a vector auto-regression model that relates bank...