This paper studies the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on export product quality. Existing studies stress the link between home country depreciation and increased access to exports via a relative price effect. Our focus in this study is on the complementary effect of an import currency...

We examine the response of equity mutual fund flows to sovereign rating changes in a wide sample of countries during the crisis prone years from 1996-2002. We find that Sovereign downgrades are strongly associated with outflows of capital from the downgraded country while improvements in a...

Many firms voluntarily incur the costs of attempting to influence politicians. However, estimates of the value of political connections have been made in only a few extreme cases. We propose a new approach to valuing political ties that builds on these previous studies. We consider connected to...

Developing countries traditionally experience passthrough of exchange rate changes that is greater and more rapid than high-income countries experience. This is true equally of the determination of prices of imported goods, prices of local competitors' products, and the general CPI. But...

Corporate lobbying activities are designed to influence legislators, regulators, and courts, presumably to encourage favorable policies and/or outcomes. In dollar terms, corporate lobbying expenditures are typically one or even two orders of magnitude larger than spending by Political Action...

This paper shows that many East Asian firms are significantly exposed to foreign exchange risk. Their exposure appears to be much more widespread than is typical for the large industrialized economies. The East Asian firms are most exposed to fluctuations in the U.S. dollar, though the mark and...

Using highly disaggregated price data of the Big Mac Meal and its ten ingredients from twenty-five European countries since 1993, we investigate two questions related to the effects of the adoption of the Euro on prices. First, was the changeover to the euro accompanied, as many believe, by an...

We document that the quality of earnings reported by politically connected firms is significantly poorer than that of similar non-connected companies. Our results are not due to firms with ex-ante poor earnings quality establishing connections more often. Instead, our results suggest that,...

We suggest it may be quot;too easyquot; to attribute real exchange rate movements to law of one price deviations. We show that it is immaterial whether one uses seemingly traded goods, nontraded goods, or even just a single, unimportant consumer good, say beer. The ease of attributing the...

We study the method proposed by Flood and Rose (FR, 2004, 2005) for checking for financial integration by estimating the risk-free rate using the idiosyncratic component of individual stock returns. Performing simulations with data with a known return generation process, we find that the FR...