This paper challenges the view that foreign investors lead firms to adopt a short-term orientation and forgo long-term investment. Using a comprehensive sample of publicly listed firms in 30 countries over the period 2001-2010, we find instead that greater foreign institutional ownership fosters long-term investment in tangible, intangible, and human capital. Foreign institutional ownership also leads to significant increases in innovation output. We identify these effects by exploiting the exogenous variation in foreign institutional ownership that follows the addition of a stock to the MSCI indexes. Our results suggest that foreign institutions exert a disciplinary role on entrenched corporate insiders worldwide.

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We study the empirical determinants of Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads through quantile regressions. In addition to traditional variables, such as implied volatility, put skew, historical stock return, leverage, profitability, and ratings, the results indicate that CDS premiums are strongly determined by CDS illiquidity costs, measured by absolute bid-ask spreads. The quantile regression approach reveals that high-risk firms are more sensitive to changes in the explanatory variables that low-risk firms. Furthermore, the goodness-of-fit of the model increases with CDS premiums, which is consistent with the credit spread puzzle.

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