membership, conduct transactions with the local corporate sector in Renminbi after 2 years, and conduct transactions with local households in local currencies after 5 years. Although foreign banks are likely to compete only in the coastal cities, at least in the initial period, the pressure on domestic banks

This paper examines whether nancial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship; that nancial development reduces the costs of external nance to rms. Speci cally, we ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of external nance

We study an incentive model of ®nancial intermediation in which ®rms as well as intermediaries are capital constrained. We analyze how the distribution of wealth across ®rms, intermediaries, and uninformed investors affects investment, interest rates, and the intensity of monitoring. We show

-run earnings “drift, ” but negative correlation between future returns and long-term past stock market and accounting performance. The theory also offers several untested implications and implications for corporate fi-nancial policy. IN RECENT YEARS A BODY OF evidence on security returns has presented a sharp

This paper evaluates (1) whether the exogenous component of financial intermediary development influences economic growth and (2) whether cross-country differences in legal and accounting systems (e.g., creditor rights, contract enforcement, and accounting standards) explain differences in the level of financial development. Using both traditional cross-section, instrumental variable procedures and recent dynamic panel techniques, we find that the exogenous components of financial intermediary development is positively associated with economic growth. Also, the data show that cross-country differences in legal and accounting systems help account for differences in financial development. Together, these findings suggest that legal and accounting reforms that strengthen creditor rights, contract enforcement, and accounting practices can boost financial development and accelerate economic growth.

No. This paper investigates the relationship between financing constraints and investment-cash flow sensitivities by analyzing the firms identified by Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen as having unusually high investment-cash flow sensitivities. We Quarterlynd that firms that appear less Quarterlynancially constrained exhibit significantly greater sensitivities than firms that appear more financially constrained. We find this pattern for the entire sample period, subperiods, and individual years. These results (and simple theoretical arguments) suggest that higher sensitivities cannot be interpreted as evidence that firms are more financially constrained. These findings call into question the interpretation of most previous research that uses this methodology. “Our financial position is sound... Most of the company’s funds are generated by operations and these funds grew at an average annual rate of 29 % [over the past 3 years]. Throughout the company’s history this self-financing concept has not been a constraint on the company’s growth. With recent growth restrained by depressed economic

We examine the separation of ownership and control for 2,980 corporations in nine East Asian countries. In all countries, voting rights frequently exceed cash-#ow rights via pyramid structures and cross-holdings. The separation of ownership and control is most pronounced among family-controlled "rms and small "rms. More than two-thirds of "rms are controlled by a single shareholder. Managers of closely held "rms tend to be relatives of the controlling shareholder's family. Older "rms are generally family-controlled, dispelling the notion that ownership becomes dispersed over time. Finally, signi"cant corporate wealth in East Asia is concentrated among a few families. � 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved. JEL classixcation: G32; L22

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This paper characterizes the dynamic effects of shocks in government spending and taxes on U. S. activity in the postwar period. It does so by using a mixed structural VAR/event study approach. Identification is achieved by using institutional information about the tax and transfer systems to identify the automatic response of taxes and spending to activity, and, by implication, to infer fiscal shocks. The results consistently show positive government spending shocks as having a positive effect on output, and positive tax shocks as having a negative effect. One result has a distinctly nonstandard flavor: both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on investment spending.

This paper reviews recent research that grapples with the question: What happens after an exogenous shock to monetary policy? We argue that this question is interesting because it lies at the center of a particular approach to assessing the empirical plausibility of structural economic models that can be used to think about systematic changes in monetary policy institutions and rules. The literature has not yet converged on a particular set of assumptions for identifying the effects of an exogenous shock to monetary policy. Nevertheless, there is considerable agreement about the qualitative effects of a monetary policy shock in the sense that inference is robust across a large subset of the identification schemes that have been considered in the literature. We document the nature of this agreement as