This article proposes a new approach to evaluate contagion in financial markets. Our measure of contagion captures the coincidence of extreme return shocks across countries within a region and across regions. 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 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.

This article proposes a new approach to evaluate contagion in financial markets. Our measure of contagion captures the coincidence of extreme return shocks across countries within a region and across regions. 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 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.

We investigate the role of limit orders in the liquidity provision in a pure order‐driven market. Results show that market depth rises subsequent to an increase in transitory volatility, and transitory volatility declines subsequent to an increase in market depth. We also examine how transitory volatility affects the mix between limit orders and market orders. When transitory volatility arises from the ask (bid) side, investors will submit more limit sell (buy) orders than market sell (buy) orders. This result is consistent with the existence of limit‐order traders who enter the market and place orders when liquidity is needed.

The stock market should fund promising new firms, thereby breeding competition, innovation, and economic growth. However, using three decades of data from 47 countries, we show that concentrated stock markets dominated by a small number of very successful firms are associated with less efficient capital allocation, sluggish initial public offering and innovation activity, and slower economic growth. These findings are robust to alternative sample periods, econometric specifications, and competing explanatory variables. Our evidence is consistent with the paradox that the capital market of a competitive economy can impede the continuing competitiveness of that economy.

Unlike previous studies that examine how emerging market return volatility changes subsequent to stock market liberalization, this paper investigates the impact of investibility, or the degree to which a stock can be foreign-owned, on emerging market volatility. We find a positive relation between return volatility and the investibility of individual stocks, even after controlling for country, industry, firm size, and turnover. We also find that a highly investible emerging market portfolio is subject to larger world market exposure than a non-investible portfolio, suggesting that highly investible stocks are more integrated with the world and therefore more vulnerable to world market risk.

This paper investigates the effect of competition among credit rating agencies on ratings quality. Specifically, we study how the ratings quality of a small local rating agency (DBRS) responds to competition from a large global rating agency (S&P) in rating Canadian corporate bonds. We find that DBRS's ratings become more favorable and less informative about the credit quality of Canadian bonds in response to increased competition from S&P. Our evidence supports the view that reputation concerns are not an effective disciplinary mechanism for small rating agencies facing competitive pressure from their larger peers.

We examine whether differences in legal protection affect the size, maturity, and interest rate spread on loans to borrowers in 48 countries. Results show that banks respond to poor enforceability of contracts by reducing loan amounts, shortening loan maturities, and increasing loan spreads. These effects are both statistically significant and economically large. While stronger creditor rights reduce spreads, they do not seem to matter for loan size and maturity. Overall, we show that variation in enforceability of contracts matters a great deal more to how loans are structured and how they are priced.

We examine two competing views regarding the impact of competition among credit rating agencies on rating quality: the view that rating agencies do not sacrifice their reputation by inflating firm ratings, and the view that competition among rating agencies arising from the conflict of interest inherent in an “issuer pay” model creates pressure to inflate ratings. Using Fitch’s market share as a measure of competition among rating agencies and controlling for the endogeneity problem caused by unobservable industry effects, we find no relation between Fitch’s market share and ratings, suggesting that competition does not lead to rating inflation.