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The possible crucial role of international bank lending in the transmission of adverse economic disturbance from advanced economies to emerging economies in the recent global financial crisis has once again placed this type of capital flows into sharper scrutiny both in academic and policy discussions. We construct macro-and micro-panel data on international bank lending to six Asian economies, viz., Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, to analyze a number of objectives. We first examine the influence of a number of critical determinants not only to overall international bank lending but also to cross-border bank lending, and obtained one critical finding in this part of the study that cross-border lending by international banks tend to pull-out from host economies during difficult times in source economies, whereas such retrenchment are not evident on an aggregated basis. This may suggest that encouraging brick-and-mortar affiliates of international banks to ‘set up shop’ in recipient economies may be the judicious choice for these economies. We next critically examine the difference between subsidiaries and branches of international banks in terms of their ability to shield themselves from the financial difficulties of their global parent banks and thus their ability to continue lending in destination markets. According to our results, foreign bank subsidiaries are more capable in this regard. This finding carries with it the obvious attraction of favoring an organizational banking structure that is biased towards subsidiaries. However, national banking regulators should remember that apart from encouraging a host of other domestic and cross-border initiatives, encouraging the entry of brick-and mortar subsidiaries of international banks should not viewed as a panacea to the financial stability concerns not only in Asia but also across emerging markets in general.

This study seeks to demonstrate that the identification of crisis episodes based on commonly applied exchange market pressure (EMP) indices, namely, Eichengreen, Rose and Wyplosz [Eichengreen, B., Rose, A., and Wyplosz, C., 1995, Exchange Market Mayhem: The Antecedents and Aftermaths of Speculative Attacks, Economic Policy 21 (October), 249–312.], Sachs, Tornell and Velasco [Sachs, J.D., Tornel, A., and Velasco, A., 1996, Financial Crises in Emerging Markets: The Lessons From 1995, Brooking Papers on Economic Activity 1, 147–215.], and Kaminsky, Lizondo and Reinhart [Kaminsky, G., Lizondo, S., and Reinhart, C., 1998, Leading Indicators of Currency Crises, IMF Staff Paper 45, 1 (March), 1–48.] are highly sensitive to the choice of: a) the weighting scheme for each component of the EMP index; and b) the statistical parametric assumption used in the constructions of crisis thresholds. To highlight further some of the potential consequences of these two pitfalls in identifying crisis episodes, this paper employs a number of possible alternative approaches to measure the exchange market pressure.