We use micro-level data to analyze emerging markets' private sector access to international debt markets during sovereign debt crises. Using fixed effect analysis, we find that these crises are systematically accompanied by a decline in foreign credit domestic private firms, both during debt renegotiations and for over two years after the restructuring agreements are reached. This decline is large (over 20 percent), statistically significant, and robust when we control for a host of fundamentals. We find that this effect is concentrated in the nonfinancial sector and is different for exporters and for firms in the non-exporting sector. We also find that the magnitude of the effect depends on the type of debt restructuring agreement.JEL classification: F34, F32, G32

Modern corporate finance theory argues that although bank monitoring is beneficial to borrowers, it also allows banks banks to use the private information they gain through monitoring to "hold-up" borrowers for higher interest rates. In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for this information hold-up cost. Since new information about a firm's creditworthiness is revealed at the time of its first issue in the public bond market, it follows that after firms undertake their bond IPO, banks with an exploitable information advantage will be forced to adjust their loan interest rates downwards, particularly for firms that are revealed to be safe. Our findings show that firms are able to borrow from banks at lower interest rates after they issue for the first time in the public bond market and that the magnitude of these savings is larger for safer firms. We further find that among safe firms, those that get their first credit rating at the time of their bond IPO benefit from larger interest rate savings than those that already had a credit rating when they entered the bond market. Since more information is revealed at the time of the bond IPO on the former firms and since this information will increase competition from uninformed banks, these findings provide support for the hypothesis that banks price their informational monopoly. Finally, we find that while entering the public bond market may reduce these informational rents, it is costly to firms because they have to pay higher underwriting costs on their IPO bonds. Moreover, IPO bonds are subject to more underpricing than subsequent bonds when they first trade in the secondary bond market.

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The importance of information asymmetries in the capital markets is commonly accepted as one of the main reasons for home bias in investment. We posit that effects of such asymmetries may be reduced through relationships between banks established through bank-to-bank lending and provide evidence to support this claim. To analyze dynamics of formation of such relationships during 1980-2009 time period, we construct a global banking network of 7938 banking institutions from 141 countries. We find that recessions and banking crises tend to have negative effects on the formation of new connections and that these effects are not the same for all countries or all banks. We also find that the global financial crisis of 2008-09 had a large negative impact on the formation of new relationships in the global banking network, especially by large banks that have been previously immune to effects of banking crises and recessions.

We review previous literature on productivity spillovers of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China and conduct our own analysis using a firm-level data set from a World Bank survey. We find that the evidence of FDI spillovers on the productivity of Chinese domestic firms is mixed, with many positive results largely due to aggregation bias or failure to control for endogeneity of FDI. Attempting over 2500 specifications which take into account forward and backward linkages, we fail to find evidence of systematic positive productivity spillovers from FDI.

Greater financial integration between core and peripheral EMU members not only had an effect on both sets of countries but also spilled over beyond the euro area. Lower interest rates allowed peripheral countries to run bigger deficits, which inflated their economies by allowing credit booms. Core EMU countries took on extra foreign leverage to expose themselves to the peripherals. We present a stylized model that illustrates possible mechanisms for these developments. We then analyze the geography of international debt flows using multiple data sources and provide evidence that after the euro's introduction, core EMU countries increased their borrowing from outside of EMU and their lending to the EMU periphery. Moreover, we present evidence that large core EMU banks' lending to periphery borrowers was linked to their borrowing from outside of the euro area.JEL classification: F32, F34, F36

We use micro-level data to analyze emerging markets' private sector access to international debt markets during sovereign debt crises. Using fixed effect analysis, we find that these crises are systematically accompanied by a decline in foreign credit domestic private firms, both during debt renegotiations and for over two years after the restructuring agreements are reached. This decline is large (over 20 percent), statistically significant, and robust when we control for a host of fundamentals. We find that this effect is concentrated in the nonfinancial sector and is different for exporters and for firms in the non-exporting sector. We also find that the magnitude of the effect depends on the type of debt restructuring agreement.JEL classification: F34, F32, G32

No abstract