Corporate Financial Policies and Performance Around Currency Crises

Arturo Bris (), Yrjö Koskinen () and Vicente Pons ()
Additional contact information
Arturo Bris: Deparment of Finance, Postal: Yale School of Management , 135 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511-3729, USA
Vicente Pons: Department of Finance, Postal: Yale School of Management , 135 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511-3729, USA

No 467, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: Using data from 17 countries that have suffered a currency crisis, this paper studies firm-level leverage and performance measures before and after a crisis has occurred. We show that in the years preceding a currency crisis, companies that are expected to benefit from currency depreciations increase their leverage more than companies that are expected to be harmed by currency depreciations. The evidence regarding the profitability and financial fragility ratios is consistent with the leverage results, since companies that are expected to benefit from depreciations fare worse than other companies before a crisis. We also provide evidence that the Asian crisis is different from the previous European and Latin American ones: in Asia firms become more fragile after the crisis and their profitability declines and leverage increases further, whereas in Europe and Latin America there are clear signs of recovery after a crisis has occurred, especially for firms that are ex-ante expected to benefit from depreciations.

Keywords: currency crises; currency depreciation; corporate leverage; capital structure; profitability; financial fragility; exchange rates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F34 G33 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2001-10-17, Revised 2002-06-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-cba, nep-cfn, nep-fin, nep-ifn and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Forthcoming in Journal of Business.

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0467.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Corporate Financial Policies and Performance around Currency Crises (2004)
Working Paper: Corporate Financial Policies and Performance Around Currency Crises (2001)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastef:0467

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().