"This paper examines whether analysts resident in a country make more precise earnings forecasts for firms in that country than analysts who are not resident in that country. Using a sample of 32 countries, we find that there is an economically and statistically significant analyst local advantage even after controlling for firm and analyst characteristics. The importance of the local advantage is inversely related to the quality of the information provided by firms. In particular, the local advantage is high in countries where earnings are smoothed more, less information is disclosed by firms, and firm idiosyncratic information explains a smaller fraction of stock returns. The local advantage is also negatively related to market participation by foreign investors and by institutions and positively related to holdings by insiders. U.S. investors underweight a country's stocks more in their portfolios if that country has a higher analyst local advantage"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

Using a large sample of exogenous events that negatively affected Korean banks during the 1997-1998 period, we examine the value of durable bank relationships in Korea. We show that adverse shocks to banks have a negative effect not only on the value of the banks themselves, but also on the value of their client firms, and that this adverse effect on firm value is a decreasing function of the financial health of both banks and client firms. Our results are concentrated in the second half of the sample period, when banks experienced severe difficulties.

This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate contagion in financial markets. Our measure of contagion captures the co-incidence of extreme return shocks across countries within a region and across regions that cannot be explained by linear propagation models of shocks. We characterize the extent of contagion, its economic significance, and its determinants using a multinomial logistic regression model. Applying our approach to daily returns of emerging markets during the 1990s, we find that contagion, when measured by the co-incidence within and across regions of extreme return shocks, is predictable and depends on regional interest rates, exchange rate changes, and conditional stock return volatility. Evidence that contagion is stronger for extreme negative returns than for extreme positive returns is mixed

Equity market liberalizations open up domestic stock markets to foreign investors. A puzzle in the literature is why developing countries exhibit relatively small financial impacts associated with liberalizations. We use cross-firm variation in corporate governance at the time of the official liberalization of the equity market in Korea to test whether governance can explain the extent to which firms benefit when countries liberalize. The results show that better-governed firms experience significantly greater stock price increases upon equity market liberalization. Following the liberalization in Korea, foreign ownership in firms with strong corporate governance was significantly higher than that in firms with weak governance. Better-governed firms also exhibit higher rates of physical capital accumulation after liberalization.