Financial openness,market structure and private credit: An empirical investigation

Consistent with recent theoretical models, this paper finds that financial openness has a positive effect on private credit in economies characterized by a competitive banking sector, but that this effect vanishes and even becomes negative in economies with imperfect banking competition.     

Purchasing power parity and country characteristics: Evidence from panel data tests

We examine long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) using panel data methods to test for unit roots in US dollar real exchange rates of 84 countries. We find stronger evidence of PPP in countries more open to trade, closer to the United States, with lower inflation and moderate nominal exchange rate volatility, and with similar economic growth rates as the United States. We also show that PPP holds for panels of European and Latin American countries, but not for African and Asian countries. Our findings demonstrate that country characteristics can help explain both adherence to and deviations from long-run PPP.     

Financial factors and the margins of trade: Evidence from cross-country firm-level data

Using a large cross-country, firm-level database containing 5000 firms in 9 developing and emerging economies, we study how financial factors affect both firms' export decisions and the amount exported by firms. First, our results highlight the importance of the impact of firms' access to finance on their entry decision into the export market. However, better financial health neither increases the probability of remaining an exporter once the firm has entered, nor the size of exports. Second, we find that financial constraints create a disconnection between firms' productivity and their export status: productivity is only a significant determinant of the export decision if the firm has a sufficient access to external finance. Finally, an increase in a country's financial development dampens this disconnection, thus acting both on the number of exporters and on the exporters' selection process. These results contribute to the literature documenting the role of fixed costs and of the extensive margin of trade in total trade adjustment, and provide micro-level evidence of the positive impact of financial development on trade found by previous literature.     

International Transmission of the 2007–2009 Financial Crisis: Evidence from Japan

We investigate the international transmission of the 2007–2009 financial crisis to Japanese firms by examining both stock returns and changes in operating performance during the crisis. Our results indicate that Japanese firms were affected by the crisis mainly through the trade channel in both stock returns and changes in operating performance. We also find that the liquidity channel played a role in the fall of stock returns in response to the crisis and in the changes in return on assets during the first year of the crisis. We obtain weak evidence for the credit crunch channel and no evidence to support the trade finance channel.     

Dynamic effects of trade openness on financial development

This paper employs the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) approach of Pesaran et al. (1999) to study the dynamic effects of trade openness on financial development. The advantage of the PMG estimator over other dynamic panel econometric techniques is that it allows short-run coefficients, speeds of adjustment and error variances to vary across countries, with cross-country homogeneity restrictions only on long-run parameters. Our results spanning 88 countries over 1960–2005 show that a positive long-run relationship between trade openness and financial development coexists with a negative short-run relationship. But when splitting the data into different income or inflation groups, this finding is observed only in relatively low-income countries or high-inflation economies.     

Priorities and sequencing in privatization: Evidence from Czech firm panel data

While privatization of state-owned enterprises has been one of the most important aspects of the economic transition from a centrally planned to a market system, no transition economy has privatized all its firms simultaneously. This raises the question of whether governments privatize firms strategically. In this paper we examine the determinants of the sequencing of privatization. To obtain testable predictions about the factors that may affect sequencing, we investigate the following competing government objectives: (i) Maximizing efficiency through resource allocation; (ii) maximizing public goodwill from the free transfers of shares to the public; (iii) minimizing political costs; (iv) maximizing efficiency through information gains; and (v) maximizing privatization revenues. Next, we use firm-level data from the Czech Republic to test the competing predictions about the sequencing of privatization. Consistent with the hypotheses of a government priority on revenues and public goodwill, we find strong evidence that more profitable firms were privatized first. The sequencing of privatization is also consistent with maximizing efficiency through information gains. Our results indicate that many empirical studies of the effects of privatization on firm performance suffer from a selection bias.     

Inequality and development: Evidence from semiparametric estimation with panel data

Evidences from nonparametric and semiparametric unbalanced panel data models with fixed effects show that Kuznet’s inverted-U relationship is confirmed when economic development reaches a threshold. The model tests justify semiparametric specification. The integrated net contribution of control variables to inequality reduction is significant.     

Foreign determinants of local institutions: Spatial dependence and openness

There are both empirical and theoretical arguments for the thesis that foreign factors have an impact on domestic institutional quality. Yet the literature is divided over whether exposure (openness to the world economy) or the kind of institutions in surrounding countries (relative location) determines the quality of local institutions. This paper confronts these hypotheses empirically, addressing the issues of strong cross-sectional dependence and the endogeneity of openness. In a 107-country cross-section, both trade openness and relative location have a positive impact on local institutions. The institutional quality of neighbouring countries is not found to be statistically significant when considering openness to foreign direct investments instead of trade, but the statistical performance of that model is poorer.     

Trade openness and the informational efficiency of emerging stock markets

This paper examines the empirical link between trade openness and the informational efficiency of stock markets in 23 developing countries. Our fixed effects panel regression results document a significant negative relation between trade openness and stock return autocorrelations only when the de facto measure is used. On this basis, we argue that a greater level of de facto trade openness is associated with a higher degree of informational efficiency in these emerging stock markets because the former signals higher future firm profitability, and investors tend to react faster to information when there is less uncertainty about a firm's future earnings or cash flows. Further analyses find no significant association between the extent of financial openness and the degree of informational efficiency.     

Repayment performance in group lending: Evidence from Jordan

Using data from a survey of 160 urban borrowing groups of the Microfund for Women in Jordan, we investigate the effect of screening, peer monitoring, group pressure, and social ties on borrowing groups' repayment behavior as an indirect test of different theoretical models. The dependent variable used captures the intensity of default measured by the total number of days of late repayment after each due date, allowing us to use count data models with cluster standard errors. As theory predicts, our empirical analysis suggests that peer monitoring, group pressure, and social ties reduce delinquency. The paper uncovers interesting evidence about the role of social ties and religion. Most notably, in an area where religion contributes to attitudes and beliefs of individuals, we find that religiosity improves repayment performance.     

Institutional development and stock price synchronicity: Evidence from China

Better developed legal and political institutions result in greater availability of reliable firm-specific information. When stock prices reflect more firm-specific information there will be less stock price synchronicity. This paper traces the experience of China, an economy undergoing dramatic institutional change in the last 20 years with rich variation in experiences across provinces. We show that stock price synchronicity is lower when there is institutional development in terms of property rights protection and rule of law. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of political pluralism on synchronicity. A more pluralistic regime reduces uncertainty and opaqueness regarding government interventions and therefore increases the value of firm-specific information that reduces synchronicity.     

Asymmetric effects of financial development on South-South and South-North trade: Panel data evidence from emerging markets

Using bilateral trade data in total and technology-and-skill-intensive manufactured goods for 28 developing countries that account for 82% of all developing country manufactures exports between 1978 and 2005, this paper explores the effects of financial development on the pattern of specialization in South-South and South-North trade. The empirical results using dynamic panel regressions and comprehensive sensitivity tests suggest that financial development in the South has an economically and statistically significant positive effect on the share of total and technology-and-skill-intensive manufactures exports in GDP, and total exports in South-South trade. In contrast, no such significant or robust effect of financial development is found in South-North trade. Overall, the positive effect of financial development is found to be asymmetric favoring South-South significantly more than South-North trade. In addition, financial development is found to be increasing technology-and-skill-intensive manufactured goods exports significantly more than total manufactured or merchandise goods exports.     

Remittances and banking sector breadth and depth: Evidence from Mexico

Despite the importance of remittances to developing countries, their impact on banking sector breadth and depth in recipient countries has been largely unexplored. We examine this topic using municipality-level data on the fraction of households receiving remittances and on measures of banking breadth and depth for Mexico. We find that remittances are strongly associated with greater banking breadth and depth, increasing the number of branches and accounts per capita and the amount of deposits to GDP. These effects are significant both statistically and economically, and are robust to the potential endogeneity of remittances, inclusion of a wide range of controls and even municipal fixed effects specifications using an alternative panel data set from a sample of municipalities.     

Maturity mismatch and financial crises: Evidence from emerging market corporations

Substantial attention has been paid in recent years to the risk of maturity mismatch in emerging markets. Although this risk is microeconomic in nature, the evidence advanced thus far has taken the form of macro correlations. We evaluate this mechanism empirically at the micro level by using a database of over 3000 publicly listed firms from fifteen emerging markets. We measure the risk of maturity mismatch by estimating, at the firm level, the effect on investment of the interaction of short-term exposure and aggregate capital flight. This effect is (statistically) zero, contrary to the prediction of the maturity-mismatch hypothesis. This conclusion is robust to using a variety of different estimators, alternative measures of capital flows, and controls for devaluation effects and access to international capital. We do find evidence that short-term-exposed firms pay higher financing costs, and have lower equity valuations, but not that this reduction in net worth translates into a drop in investment or sales.     

Financial liberalization and the relationship-specificity of exports

We investigate the causal impact of equity market liberalizations on sectoral export performance across 91 countries (1980–1997). The increased availability of external finance has boosted trade of industries that intensively use relationship-specific inputs, and lowered exports of industries using standardized inputs.     

Financial development and financial openness nexus: the precondition of banking competition

We examine the dynamic relationship between financial development and financial openness using the pooled mean group estimator developed by Pesaran et al. (1999). Our results show that financial openness has a positive effect on financial development in the long run, but may have a negative effect in the short run. Using estimates of country-specific short-run coefficients, we also find that the adverse short-run effects of financial openness are associated with a lower degree of banking competition. The system GMM estimator also supports these findings, suggesting that the financial development and financial openness nexus is contingent on the degree of banking competition. A key policy implication is that a higher degree of banking competition is a precondition for financial openness to promote financial development.     

Financial structure,productivity, and risk of foreign direct investment

This study investigates how heterogeneous firms choose their lenders when they raise external finance for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and how the choice of financing structure affects FDI activities. We establish an asymmetric information model to analyze why certain firms use private bank loans while others use public bonds to finance foreign production. The hidden information is the productivity shock to FDI. Banks are willing to monitor the risk of FDI, while bondholders are not; hence, banks act as a costly middleman that enables firms to avoid excessive risk. We show that firms’ productivity levels, the riskiness of FDI, and the relative costs of bank finance and bond finance are three key determinants of the firm’s financing choice. Countries with higher productivity, higher bank costs, or investment in less risky destinations, use more bond finance than bank finance. These results are supported by evidence from OECD countries.     

Risk attitudes and reservation wages of unemployed workers: Evidence from panel data

This paper studies risk attitudes of unemployed job seekers and their relationship to self-reported reservation wages. We find that risk aversion is prevalent, and that reservation wages decrease slightly over time. Furthermore, risk aversion and reservation wages are negatively correlated.     

The patterns and determinants of longevity in Russia's regions: Evidence from panel data

In this paper we examine whether regions of Russia have been converging or diverging in their longevity levels during the 1990s and evaluate the divergence effect of the 1998 financial crisis. We also estimate the impact of changes in poverty and public health spending on inter-temporal variations in longevity using regional-level panel data for 77 Russian regions from 1994 to 2000. Finally, we investigate the extent to which the gradual recovery in longevity observed after 1994 was derailed by the 1998 financial crisis and the public policy shifts required for regions to regain their Soviet-era levels of longevity. We find a significant negative effect of the 1998 crisis on longevity independently of the factors related directly to poverty and public health spending. In addition, a permanent negative shock to the incidence of poverty and the amount of publicly-provided health care in a region has enduring consequences on the population's health. Finally, the effect of increases in public health spending on longevity is related positively to the incidence of poverty. Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (4) (2005) 788–813.