Search Results
Journal Article
Monetary explanations of the Great Depression: a selective survey of empirical evidence
Seventy years after the Great Depression, economists still debate the causes of this economic catastrophe. Two leading explanations are distinguished by whether or not the Federal Reserve?s monetary policies are perceived as being chiefly responsible for propagating and magnifying the initial contraction into a depression. ; This article surveys recent modeling efforts and empirical work that examine aggregate explanations for the Great Depression from both the extensive literature using vector autoregression techniques and the more recent literature using dynamic stochastic general ...
Working Paper
Emerging market liberalization and the impact on uncovered interest rate parity
In this paper we make use of the uncovered interest rate parity (UIRP) relationship to examine the extent that the liberalization of emerging financial markets has resulted in the integration of developing countries' currency markets into the international capital market. Previous tests of the impact of liberalization on the integration of emerging markets capital markets into world financial markets are confined to equity markets, ignoring currency markets that arguably are more important in determining the success of financial liberalization. We find that, in general, deviation from UIRP in ...
Working Paper
Suspension of payments, bank failures, and the nonbank public's losses
Arguably, eliminating suspensions of payments--periods when banks jointly refuse to convert their liabilities into outside money or other assets--was an important impetus for creating the Federal Reserve. Friedman and Schwartz suggest that a suspension in 1930 would have decreased the severity of the Great Depression. More recently, an emerging literature suggests that suspensions of payments may well be optimal in some states of the world. We present evidence about suspensions of payments from an episode that is close to a controlled experiment for examining their effects. In 1861, about 44 ...
Working Paper
Bank relationships and small firms’ financial performance
We examine the relationship between the number of bank relationships and firms? performance, evaluating possible differential effects related to firms? size. Our sample of firms from Italy includes many small firms, 99 percent of which are not listed and for which bank debt is a major source of financing. In the sample, 4 percent of the firms have a single bank relationship, and 66 percent of them have five or fewer relationships. We find that return on equity and return on assets decrease as the number of bank relationships increases, with a stronger relationship for small firms than for ...
Working Paper
Corporate social responsibility and shareholder's value: an event study analysis
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly a core component of corporate strategy in the global economy. In recent years its importance has become even greater, primarily because of the financial scandals, investors? losses, and reputational damage to listed companies. While corporations are busy adopting and enhancing CSR practices, there is (beyond very few notable exceptions) no established empirical research on CSR?s impact and relevance in the capital market. This paper investigates this issue by tracing the market reaction to corporate entry and exit from the Domini 400 ...
Working Paper
Does geography matter to bondholders?
We find that the location of corporate headquarters significantly affects the firm?s bondholders. Similar to Loughran and Schultz (2006) and others, who show that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies, we look at firms located in large metropolitan cities, small cities, and rural areas and find that firms located in remote rural areas exhibit significantly higher costs of debt capital (of up to 65 basis points) in comparison to their urban counterparts. Unlike other studies that focus on the role of information asymmetries in the local bias of investors and ...
Working Paper
Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods
In this article we analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. We suggest that the level of cross-border holdings of long-term securities between the United States and the rest of the world may indicate a direct link between the turmoil in the securitized market originated in the United States and that in other countries. We provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several Economics and Operations Research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or ...
Working Paper
Further evidence on the link between finance and growth: an international analysis of community banking and economic performance
We try to contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth, and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993-2000 on 49 nations. Data from both developed and developing nations suggest that greater market shares and efficiency ranks of small, private, domestically-owned banks are associated with better economic performance, and that the marginal benefits of higher shares are greater when the banks are more efficient. Only mixed ...