Foreign Banks and International Shock Transmission: Ownership Matters No More

This paper studies the recent (2007-2009) Global Financial Crisis and its transmission through bank lending to emerging Asian economies. It highlights two channels of shock transmission identified in the literature: bank ownership and liquidity. We find that the bank ownership does not play a substantial role in the transmitting process. It is the liquidity channel measured by lending in foreign currency that is mainly responsible for the GFC transmission to the loan market in Asia, albeit the effect on the credit market is likely to be small. Additionally, our results suggest that the contraction of foreign currency liquidity is partially substituted by domestic currency lending. However, the substitution occurs only within banks and not between banks owing to high switching costs. We employ a unique dataset on new loan issuance to Asian borrowers and apply a recently developed method (Khwaja and Mian 2008) to address the identification problem in examining bank lending and shock transmission. Our results are robust according to a number of sensitivity analyses.