We examine the valuation effect of the resolution of a bank’s insolvency on commercial clients. Our sample includes 29 insolvent banks in Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand that serve as main creditors for 269 publicly traded companies. Our findings suggest that a bank relationship adds value to a firm, and that this value depends on investors’ certainty in the continuity of the banking relationship. Significant cumulative returns for 50 days following the event date suggest that the type of resolution has real effects on the performance of related firms above initial expectations.

This paper examines the investment allocation choices of actively-managed US mutual funds in emerging market equities after the market crises of the 1990s. We analyze both country- and firm-level disclosure and institutional policies that influence mutual funds’ allocation choices relative to major stock market indices. At the country level, we find that US funds invest more in open emerging markets with stronger accounting standards, shareholder rights, and legal frameworks. At the firm level, US funds are found to invest more in firms that adopt discretionary policies such as greater accounting transparency and the issuance of an ADR. Our results suggest that steps can be taken both at the country and the firm level to create an environment conducive to foreign institutional investment.

We jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. We argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model. “Nonrobustness” checks (which purposely exclude some indicators) support this argument. Using data from Argentina in the 1990s, our strongest and most robust results concern state ownership. State-owned banks have poor long-term performance (static effect), those undergoing privatization had particularly poor performance beforehand (selection effect), and these banks dramatically improved following privatization (dynamic effect), although much of the measured improvement is likely due to placing nonperforming loans into residual entities, leaving “good” privatized banks.