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We examine the predilection for private bonds over bank financing (debt structure) for emerging markets within the frameworks of both transaction cost economics and a transparency explanation, emphasizing the distinction between public monitoring (bonds) and private monitoring (banks), as well as considering the influence of national culture on institutions. Employing several tests, including structural equation modeling, we find, among many results that in emerging markets bonds are preferred over bank loans when there is less corporate opacity and fewer foreign access restrictions, as well as in environment of greater political instability, transaction cost, and limits to legal protection. Bonds are also favored over banks in cultural environments of greater uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, long-term orientation, and indulgence and less individualism. Overall, we attribute our results to culture and institutional quality together influencing debt structure, particularly by impacting attitudes toward public monitoring. Our results will be of great interest to researchers interested in the legal, social, and cultural environments of emerging markets.

This paper analyzes the impact of macroeconomic announcements on the correlation between credit spreads and the term structure of interest rates. We propose to employ an extended version of the Constant Conditional Correlations framework of Bollerslev (1990) to describe the evolution of the first difference of the credit spread, the first difference of the level of the term structure, and the first difference of the slope of the term structure. Our main empirical findings can be summarized as follows: (a) The credit spread and the level of the term structure are uncorrelated on macroeconomic announcement days. (b) The credit spread and the level of the term structure are negatively correlated. (c) The credit spread and the slope of the term structure are negatively correlated. (d) The process for the conditional variance of the credit spread is highly persistent. (e) The conditional variance of the credit spread is smaller on macroeconomic announcement days than on other days. The results, (a) in particular, provide important new information about how corporate bond asset pricing models should be specified.