“You Can Enter but You Cannot Leave…”: U.S. Securities Markets and Foreign Firms

Although a number of prior papers have argued the benefits to foreign firms of cross‐listing their shares in the U.S., the number of foreign firms exiting U.S. capital markets has been increasing. This has occurred despite the difficulties foreign firms face in deregistering from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This paper examines the reasons underlying this trend. One of our main findings is that the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act has reduced the net benefits of a U.S. listing and registration, particularly for smaller foreign firms with lower trading volume and stronger insider control.     

Competition,Loan Rates,and Information Dispersion in Nonprofit and For‐Profit Microcredit Markets

We describe the competitive environment of microcredit markets globally and we study the effects of competition on loan rates of microfinance institutions (MFIs). We use a new database from rating agencies, covering 379 for‐profit and nonprofit MFIs in 67 countries over 2002–2008. Controlling for interest rate ceilings and other country‐specific factors, we first find that nonprofits are relatively insensitive to industry‐wide concentration changes, while for‐profits charge significantly lower rates in less concentrated markets. Second, we find spillover effects between the for‐profit and nonprofit segments. Third, we show that the effects of concentration are consistent with an information dispersion mechanism.     

ON THE SOURCES OF AGGREGATE FLUCTUATIONS IN EMERGING ECONOMIES

Recent research on macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging economies has advocated introducing a stochastic productivity trend or allowing for interest rate shocks and financial frictions. We estimate a model that encompasses these two approaches, shedding light on their relative merits and on how financial frictions affect the transmission of shocks. The model accounts for aggregate fluctuations by assigning a dominant role to financial frictions in amplifying conventional (temporary) productivity shocks, whereas trend shocks play a minor role. A link between spreads and expected future productivity emerges as essential for a reasonable approximation to the data.     

Labor Mobility: Implications for Asset Pricing

Labor mobility is the flexibility of workers to walk away from an industry in response to better opportunities. I develop a model in which labor flows make bad times worse for shareholders who are left with capital that is less productive. The model shows that firms face greater operating leverage by providing flexibility to mobile workers. I construct an empirical measure of labor mobility consistent with the model and document an economically significant cross‐sectional relation between mobility, operating leverage, and stock returns. I find that firms in mobile industries earn returns over 5% higher than those in less mobile industries.     

What Do Investment Banks Truly Bring to the Table?

This paper investigates the role of intermediaries in the initial public offering (IPO) process. In the U.S. market, investment banks have traditionally been involved in a firm‐commitment or best‐efforts underwriting capacity. However, in the Australian IPO market, investment banks are increasingly being named in association with new issues in diverse roles such as issue managers, sponsoring brokers and corporate advisers. Using a sample of 468 IPOs over the 1996 to mid‐2006 period, we examine the influence of investment banks across these different engagements. In support of the signalling and information production roles of intermediaries, we find that issuers choosing high intermediary involvement are typically older, retain more capital, seek to raise larger amounts of capital and are without independent expert certification. We find mixed support for the certification hypothesis when testing for the effect of intermediary reputation on IPO issuer wealth loss. Further, the impact of intermediary involvement on underpricing is not significantly different for the different levels of intermediary involvement once issue characteristics have been accounted for. This is puzzling since these different roles by definition do not provide the same level of issue quality assurance.     

Banking Competition,Collateral Constraints,and Optimal Monetary Policy

We analyze optimal monetary policy in a model with two distinct financial frictions: monopolistically competitive banks that charge endogenous lending spreads, and collateral constraints. We show that welfare maximization is equivalent to stabilization of four goals: inflation, output gap, the “consumption gap” between borrowers and savers, and a “housing gap” that measures the distortion in the distribution of the collateralizable asset between both groups. Collateral constraints create a trade‐off between stabilization goals. Following both productivity and financial shocks, and relative to strict inflation targeting, the optimal policy implies sharper movements in the policy rate, aimed primarily at reducing fluctuations in asset prices and hence in borrowers' net worth. The policy trade‐offs become amplified as banking competition increases, due to the fall in lending spreads and the resulting increase in borrowers' leverage.     

What Accounts for the Changes in U.S. Fiscal Policy Transmission?

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series for 1957–79 and 1983–2004, we find government spending shocks to have stronger effects on output, consumption, and wages in the earlier period. We try to account for this observation within a DSGE model featuring price rigidities and limited asset market participation. Specifically, we estimate the structural parameters of the model for both periods by matching impulse responses. Model‐based counterfactual experiments suggest that most of the changes in fiscal policy transmission are accounted for by increased asset market participation and the more active monetary policy of the Volcker–Greenspan period.