Book Description

The main purpose of this dissertation is to identify the prominent channels through which financial decisions are transmitted to real economic activities with three different empirical studies. The first essay examines investment behavior and the effects of financing constraints among Korean manufacturing firms before and after the 1997 financial crisis using a firm-level panel data. The results indicate that investment depends on both sales and the level of cash balances. Firms' financing constraints, as measured by their cash balances, turn out to be binding in financially "weaker" groups such as younger firms and those with lower dividend payouts. The second essay identifies the role of non-monetary factors using a methodology similar to Bernanke's (1983) study of the Great Depression in the United States. We find that increases in the spread between market interest rates and government bond yields, which is a measure of the cost of credit intermediation, whether caused by shifts in business risk or lowered expectations for the Korean economy among international investors, explain the decline in output more fully than frameworks relying only on a fall in the real stock of money. The results, obtained from structural regression equations, unrestricted vector autoregressive systems, and the accompanying dynamic forecasts, suggest that the causes of the crisis lie in factors far deeper than shifts in precautionary and speculative demands for the won. We also find that the credit crunch following the crisis affected light industry more emphatically than heavy industry. The third essay examines the impact of financial factors on economic growth in several East Asian countries using macroeconomic panel data and various estimation techniques. The dynamic panel vector autoregressive analysis shows that growth in these countries was to some extent "finance-led." We do not find that the relationship between finance and growth differs between the four countries that experienced crises (Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand) and the other countries that did not. The results suggest that we may not be able to blame the financial sector solely as the main trigger of the economic crisis. While these essays focus on the 1997 East Asian crisis, and may give more attention on the Korean episode, we believe that they shed light on financial and economic developments more generally since the crisis could happen to any country, especially when they are on a path to having more developed and internationally open economies.