This paper provides new evidence on the unique role of trade credit and contracting terms as a way for both sellers and buyers to mange business risk. The authors use a novel and unique dataset on almost 30,000 supplier contracts for 56 large buyers and more than 24,000 suppliers in Europe and...

October 2000 - Financial liberalization reduces imperfections in financial markets by reducing the agency costs of financial leverage. Small firms gain most from liberalization, because the favoritism of preferential credit directed to large firms tends to disappear under liberalization. Laeven...

Banks restructured after East Asia's crisis of 1997 - most of them family-owned or company-owned and almost never foreign-owned - tended to be heavy risk takers. Most of them had excessive credit growth. - Laeven uses a linear programming technique (data envelopment analysis) to estimate the...

The bulk of corporate governance theory examines the agency problems that arise from two extreme ownership structures: 100 percent small shareholders or one large, controlling owner combined with small shareholders. In this paper, we question the empirical validity of this dichotomy. In fact,...

This paper studies how U.S. monetary policy affects global stock prices. We find that global stock prices respond strongly to changes in U.S. interest rate policy, with stock prices increasing (decreasing) following unexpected monetary loosening (tightening). This impact is more pronounced for...

This paper presents a new database of systemic banking crises for the period 1970-2009. While there are many commonalities between recent and past crises, both in terms of underlying causes and policy responses, there are some important differences in terms of the scale and scope of...

This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two novel identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in...

This paper presents a model of a multinational firm''s optimal debt policy that incorporates international taxation factors. The model yields the prediction that a multinational firm''s indebtedness in a country depends on a weighted average of national tax rates and differences between national...

This paper shows that banks use accounting discretion to overstate the value of distressed assets. Banks'' balance sheets overvalue real estate-related assets compared to the market value of these assets, especially during the U.S. mortgage crisis. Share prices of banks with large exposure to...

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...