While the benefits of bank financing are relatively well understood, the costs are not. This paper argues that while informed banks make flexible financial decisions which prevent a firm's projects from going awry, the cost of this credit is that banks have bargaining power over the firm's profit once projects have begun. The firm's portfolio choice of borrowing source and the choice of priority for its debt claims attempt to optimally circumscribe the powers of banks.

This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship: that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, we ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of external finance develop disproportionately faster in countries with more-developed financial markets. We find this to be true in a large sample of countries over the 1980's. We show this result is unlikely to be driven by omitted variables, outliers, or reverse causality.

The authors investigate the determinants of capital structure choice by analyzing the financing decisions of public firms in the major industrialized countries. At an aggregate level, firm leverage is fairly similar across the G-7 countries. The authors find that factors identified by previous studies as correlated in the cross-section with firm leverage in the United States are similarly correlated in other countries as well. However, a deeper examination of the U.S. and foreign evidence suggests that the theoretical underpinnings of the observed correlations are still largely unresolved.

[What determines the sustainability of sovereign debt? We develop a model where myopic governments seek popularity but can nevertheless commit credibly to service external debt. They do not default when debt is low because they would lose access to debt markets and be forced to reduce spending; they do not default as debt builds up and net new borrowing becomes difficult, because of the adverse consequences from default to the domestic financial sector. More myopic governments default less often, but tax in a more distortionary way and increase the vulnerability of the domestic financial sector to future government debt default.]

Firms may be financed by their suppliers rather than by financial institutions. There are many theories of trade credit, but few comprehensive empirical tests. This article attempts to fill the gap. We focus on small firms whose access to capital markets may be limited and find evidence suggesting that firms use more trade credit when credit from financial institutions is unavailable. Suppliers lend to constrained firms because they have a comparative advantage in getting information about buyers, they can liquidate assets more efficiently, and they have an implicit equity stake in the firms. Finally, firms with better access to credit offer more trade credit.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 removed commercial banks from the securities underwriting business. We evaluate the argument for the separation of commercial and investment banking, that conflicts of interest induce commercial banks to fool the public into investing in securities which turn out to be of low quality. A comparison of the performance of securities underwritten by commercial and investment banks prior to the Act shows no evidence of this. Instead, the public appears to have rationally accounted for the possibility of conflicts of interest, and this appears to have constrained the banks to underwrite high-quality securities.

This paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm. The authors analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the Small Business Administration. The primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases. The authors find smaller effects on the price of credit. Attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple leaders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit. In sum, relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices.

The original purpose of the former was to help post-World War II reconstruction, the purpose of the latter was to help revive global trade while averting the “beggar-thy-neighbor ” exchange rate policies that characterized the inter-war years. Over the years, the World Bank has refocused on helping poor countries grow while the Fund broadly attempts to foster country policies that ensure macroeconomic stability and limit adverse spillovers to the rest of the world. It still is in the world’s self interest to reduce poverty and economic instability in all countries, not just because their effects spread through trade but also because they can be sources of conflict and terrorism, of politically difficult immigration and of environmental degradation. But can multilateral financiers like the World Bank and the IMF help attain these goals? In the past, they contributed through loans and through economic advice, with the former being the lever through which multilateral institutions forced countries to accept the latter. Over the years, the value of both contributions has eroded, as I will discuss. Multilateral institutions will have to change, doing old tasks in new ways as also performing new tasks such as slowing climate change. Critical to their transformation will be the attitudes of the countries that play the largest role in their governance. These then are the subject of the rest of the paper.

To produce significant net present value, an entrepreneur has to differentiate her enterprise from the ordinary. To take collaborators with her, she needs to have substantial ownership, and thus financing. But it is hard to raise finance against differentiated assets. So an entrepreneur has to commit to undertake a second transformation, standardization, that will make the human capital in the firm, including her own, replaceable, so that outside financiers obtain control rights that will allow them to be repaid. A vibrant stock market helps the entrepreneur commit to these two transformations. The nature of firms and financing are intimately linked.