Extant literature suggests that bank monitoring improves corporate governance. This paper demonstrates that inefficiency in banking can also significantly reduce the equity capital markets' disciplinary power. Specifically, we show that in an environment in which the banking system is dominated by inefficient state-owned banks, controlling shareholders' tunneling activity is positively associated with firms' bank loan access. This relation is particularly strong in firms with high borrowing capacity, as measured by tangibility, and in regions where the banking industry is severely inefficient. As firms with high tunneling can continue to receive new loans with interest cost compatible to others, equity capital market disciplinary forces do not apply to them. Indeed, we further show that through tunneling, bank financing is negatively associated with future firm performance. These results suggest that, for an economy to develop mature capital markets, it is imperative to improve banking efficiency because its inefficiency dilutes the monitoring role of the market.

Where legal systems and market forces enforce contracts inadequately, vertical integration can circumvent these transaction difficulties. But, such environments often also feature highly interventionist government, and even corruption. Vertical integration might then enhance returns to political rent-seeking aimed at securing and extending market power. China offers a suitable background for empirical examination of these issues because her legal and market institutions are generally weak, but nonetheless exhibit substantial province-level variation. We report that Chinese firms in the 2000's are more vertically integrated than the U.S. firms in the 1990s. We find that vertical integration is more common where legal institutions are weaker and where regional governments are of lower quality or more interventionist. Further, firms led by insiders with political connection are more likely to be vertically integrated. Finally, vertical integration among politically unconnected firms is associated with elevated per capita GDP level and growth, while vertical integration among politically connected firms is unrelated to local economy performance.

This paper examines the leverage policies of multinational corporations (MNCs) in comparison to those of domestic corporations (DCs). Prior studies document that MNCs have lower leverage levels. However, our analysis of U.S. firms over the period 1981–2010 reveals that the leverage levels of MNCs are not significantly lower than those of DCs if we control for key firm characteristics related to leverage levels. We also find that MNCs and DCs do not differ significantly in terms of their debt maturity structure, the speed of leverage adjustments, or the propensity to issue debt vs. equity (or vs. not to issue debt). The results suggest that MNCs' financial policies at the corporate level are not significantly influenced by their greater exposures, in comparison to DCs, to market imperfections such as taxes and regulations. Interestingly, however, our additional analysis of MNCs from outside the U.S. reveals that non-U.S. MNCs issue securities more frequently and adjust leverage faster than their domestic peers.