The embrace of globalization and protectionism among economies has ebbed and flowed over the past few decades. These fluctuations call for quantitative analytics to help countries improve their trade policies. Changing attitudes about globalization also imply that the best trade policies may...

We develop a model predicting two channels through which creditor protection enhances the performance of stock prices: (1) The probability of a liquidity crisis leading to a binding investment-finance constraint falls with a strong protection of creditors; (1) The stock prices under the...

This paper analyzes the effect of creditor protection on the volatility of stock market returns. Our application of the Tobin’s q model predicts that credit protection reduces the probability of oscillations between binding and nonbinding states of the credit constraint, which result from...

We establish an empirical regularity that a weak creditor protection index is associated with high stock price volatility. Using a standard Tobin Q model we demonstrate two distinct mechanisms that are responsible for increased volatility: credit guarantees and weak creditor protection that...

Data show that better creditor protection is correlated across countries with lower average stock market volatility. Moreover, countries with better creditor protection are observed to have suffered lower decline in their stock market indexes during the current financial crisis. To explain this...

Foreign direct investors are more informed than foreign portfolio investors regarding changes in the prospects of their projects. This inside information, acquired through rigorous monitoring of management, enables foreign direct investors to manage their firms more efficiently. Having better...

How does increasing globalization affect corporate transparency? Freer trade represents two facets and in theory has ambiguous effects on corporate transparency. On the one hand, by exposing firms to more product market competition, it could discourage discretionary disclosure. On the other...

Trade globalization may affect corporate transparency via multiple channels, with potentially opposite signs. We aim to empirically disentangle these channels by tracking evolution of corporate transparency for 4061 listed firms in tradable sectors in 49 countries during 1992–2005. By using...

The proposed SDN documents the evolution of bank size and activities over the past 20 years. It discusses whether this evolution can be explained by economies of scale or “too big to fail†subsidies. The paper then presents evidence on the extent to which bank size and market-based...