Search Frictions,Financial Frictions,and Labor Market Fluctuations in Emerging Markets

This article examines the role of the extensive and intensive margins of labor input in the context of a business cycle model with a financial friction. We document significant variation in the hours worked per worker for many emerging-market economies using manufacturing data. Both employment and hours worked per worker are positively correlated with each other and with output. We show that a search-theoretic context in a small open-economy model requires a small wealth effect to explain these regularities at the expense of a smaller wage response. On the other hand, introducing a financial friction in the form of a working capital requirement can explain the observed movements of labor market variables such as employment and hours worked per worker, as well as other distinguishable business cycle characteristics of emerging economies. These include highly volatile and cyclical real wages, labor share, and consumption.     

Trade Credit or Financial Credit? An International Study of the Choice and Its Influences

Trade credit financing has usually been assumed to be an expensive source of funds. Recent studies, however, suggested that it can be available at either low or no cost. Using an international panel of firms, we provide an empirical answer to this matter. We analyze the type of firms and financial environments that are associated with a relatively more intense use of financial credit and, consistent with the mainstream literature, we find that trade credit financing is chosen by firms that have more restricted access to financial credit. These results appear to be stronger for firms located in emerging markets.     

Returns,Volatilities, and Correlations Across Mature,Regional, and Frontier Markets: Evidence from South Asia

We investigate returns, volatilities, and correlations across mature, dominant regional, and frontier equity markets. Standard & Poor's 500 is chosen as a mature equity market; India is chosen as a dominant regional market; and Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are chosen as frontier markets. Our empirical tests show that the frontier markets remain fundamentally decoupled from the mature markets during normal market periods. During turbulent times, the contagion effects from the mature to the frontier markets become more pronounced. The results suggest that the dominant regional market plays a key role in disseminating shocks across the frontier markets during normal periods; during the turbulent recent financial crisis period, a similar contagion is not observed.     

Financial dollarization in Russia: causes and consequences

We review some aspects of financial dollarization in Russia, applying the main relevant theories to analyse the dynamics of several dollarization indicators. An econometric model of the short-run dynamics of deposit and loan dollarization is estimated for the last decade. We find that ruble appreciation was the main driver of the de-dollarization that occurred then and of the later episode of renewed dollarization. We estimate the overall (and sectoral) currency mismatches of the Russian economy. Evidence is presented for the significant currency risk vulnerability of the non-banking private sector.     

Impression Management in Letters to Shareholders: Evidence from Poland

We study impression management in an emerging market setting with high ownership concentration. Using content analysis, we identify impression management techniques in a sample of letters to shareholders written in the Polish language by the 60 largest companies listed at the Warsaw Stock Exchange in 2008 and 2013. We find patterns in the occurrence of these techniques with the use of k-means clustering: the largest cluster includes letters that praise the management, while the rest include defensive arguments, discussions of negative outcomes and short, formal letters. The more concentrated ownership is, the shorter the letters are, which indicates that management invest less effort in communicating with investors. This is particularly visible in companies held by insiders, which tend to produce short, formal letters, devoid of impression management. In contrast, companies controlled by foreign shareholders prepare letters that are longer and which are more likely to present defensive arguments, while institutional non-controlling shareholders favour extensive disclosure. The results shed light upon communication practices in Central and Eastern Europe, and offer implications for regulators and managers that may help strengthen the information environment in regional stock markets.     

Financial Integration of Large- and Small-Cap Stocks in Emerging Markets

This study examines the financial integration of large- and small-cap stocks in twenty-three emerging markets to determine their degree of market integration with the world market. The international asset pricing model cannot be rejected for most large-cap stock portfolios, but it is rejected for small-cap stock portfolios. The findings also demonstrate that super-large-cap stocks have the fewest pricing errors and their global financial integration has increased in recent years. In sum, the empirical results indicate that global market integration is primarily associated with the super-large-cap stocks of large emerging markets.     

Global integration and emerging stock market excess returns

This article studies the effects of the global integration process on emerging stock market excess returns in a dynamic context. I improve the existing literature in four main directions. First, I show that the average excess returns rise as the level of financial and real integration rises. Second, I find overwhelming evidence that the financial liberalizations (i.e. de jure integration) of the late 1980s and early 1990s have not been simultaneously accompanied by a de facto integration. Third, I find that the percentage of variation in emerging excess returns explained by non-traded global risk factors rises as the level of market openness rises. Last, at the country level, I show that the correlation coefficient does not represent a robust measure of integration. Results also suggest that there are substantial cross-country differences in the dynamics of the degree of financial integration.     

Liquidity and Return Relationships in an Emerging Market

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between liquidity and stock returns in the Vietnam stock market during the global financial crisis. Vietnam is one of a new group of frontier emerging markets referred to as CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa). We use a rich and detailed data set of firm characteristics to identify a positive relationship between liquidity and stock returns. This contradicts the negative correlation typically found in stock returns in developed markets. Our results support the proposition that when a market is not fully integrated with the global economy, a lack of liquidity will be a less important risk factor. Our findings contribute to those studies that highlight the diversification benefits from including frontier markets, which have a lower degree of integration with the global economy, in international portfolios.     

新兴市场金融脆弱性:基于国际资本易变性的分析

随着国际资本流动规模的日益庞大,其易变性的破坏力也越来越大,而且在新兴市场国家表现得尤为强烈,这加剧了新兴市场国家金融脆弱性。国际资本易变性从冲击货币稳定、影响国际收支的可维持性以及国际游资对金融市场的高度投机三个方面加剧了新兴市场金融脆弱性。它在新兴市场表现尤为强烈的原因在于新兴市场的不稳定性和不成熟性。     

Financial regulation: rising to the challenge

This paper discusses major initiatives from regulation in global financial markets in response to the current crisis. From the perspective of emerging markets a few issues of significance may include: whether shortcomings in innovations in structured financial market products will limit the scope of their development in the emerging markets, and restrict the scope of financial growth? Could more flows be expected to emerging markets from Western banking centres looking for productive opportunities? Are there opportunities for emerging markets finance to invest in good companies with strong balance sheets that are available at relatively cheap valuations. Will the Middle East emerge as a power centre in global finance?     

量化宽松政策的溢出效应分析

摘要：本文探讨了与美联储及其货币政策相关的四个问题,包括量化宽松政策对新兴市场国家的影响、美联储在为国际金融市场提供流动性方面的作用、量化宽松政策与货币操纵以及国际贸易与国际资本管制等,并提出新兴市场国家应通过政策调整应对量化宽松政策、增加对国际货币基金组织的资金投入及推动双边投资和自由贸易谈判等政策建议。     

El efecto de la volatilidad del peso mexicano en los rendimientos y riesgo de la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores

The effect of heavy tails due to rare events and different levels of asymmetry associated with high volatility clustering in the emerging financial markets requires sophisticated models for statistical modelling of such stylized facts. This article applies extreme value theory (EVT) to quantify tail risk on the daily returns of Mexican stock market under aggregation of foreign exchange rate risk from January 1971 to December 2010. This study focuses on the maximum-block method and generalized extreme value distribution (GEVD) to model the asymptotic behavior of extreme returns in US dollars. The empirical results show that EVT-Based VaR measured at high confidence levels performs better than simulation historical and delta-normal VaR models on capturing fat-tails in the returns of highly volatile stock markets. Additionally, international investors holding long positions in Mexican stock market are more prone to experience larger potential losses than investors with short positions during local currency depreciation and financial crisis periods.     

Financial crises and emerging stock markets volatility: do internal factors matter?

This paper has two central aims. The first one is to deal empirically with the effects of financial crises on emerging stock markets volatility. The second objective consists in testing if the level of stock market development affects this relationship. For this purpose, we estimate a static panel data model for a sample of nine emerging economies from January 1990 to December 2006. We consider three types of financial crises, i.e. banking, currency and twin crises. Our empirical results suggest that the onset of financial crises strongly increased stock market volatility. In addition, we find that the biggest impact is exerted by twin crises. When dealing with the second objective, our results show that the market size and the liquidity level can attenuate the effects of banking and currency crises, but not the one associated to twin crises. Nevertheless, the degree of stock market integration seems to reduce the effects of banking, currency and twin crises on stock market volatility.     

Initial and Long-Run IPO Returns in Central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

This article provides original evidence on IPO underpricing and long-run underperformance in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and compares results to the European Union’s developed capital markets from 2000 to 2009. Using both index-adjusted and CAPM-adjusted returns, we find significant underpricing that is significantly higher than underpricing of comparable IPOs in the European Union’s developed capital markets. We show that the CEE’s initial IPO returns also exhibit significantly higher volatility. In line with the asymmetric information theory, we indicate that smaller IPOs in the CEE region have greater underpricing than the larger IPOs. Contrary to the literature, we unambiguously confirm long-run underperformance toward the benchmarks. In some model specifications, we also find that IPO long-run underperformance in the CEE region is less present than in the European Union’s developed capital markets.     

Rapid Credit Growth in Emerging Markets: Boon or Boom-Bust?

Episodes of rapid credit growth, especially credit booms, tend to end abruptly, typically in the form of financial crises. This paper presents the findings of a comprehensive event study focusing on sixty credit booms across emerging markets. The build-up of credit booms across emerging markets seems to be characterized by loose monetary policy stances, with domestic policy rates below trend during the prepeak phase of credit booms. While credit booms are associated with episodes of large capital inflows, international interest rates (a proxy for global liquidity) are virtually flat during these periods. Therefore, although external factors such as global liquidity conditions matter, and possibly increasingly so over time, domestic factors (especially monetary policy) also appear to be tightly associated with real credit growth across emerging markets.     

Effect of Capital Flight on Investment: Evidence from Emerging Markets

Much of the discussion on international capital movements is directed toward studying the effects of foreign capital flows, whereas the implications of resident capital outflows (capital flight) from developing countries remain largely unanalyzed. Using a dynamic panel methodology for twenty-two emerging market economies between 1975 and 2000, this paper investigates the effect of capital flight on investment and how this effect changes with financial liberalization policies. The empirical findings indicate that capital flight reduces private investment dramatically but does not have any effect on public investment. However, no statistically significant impact of financial liberalization on the marginal effect of capital flight on investment is found.     

Risk-Adjusted Performances of World Equity Indices

This article investigates whether equity indices of twenty-four emerging and twenty-eight developed markets compensate their investors equally after adjusting for total or downside risk, and examines the predictive power of reward-to-risk ratios for expected market returns. We find that when all fifty-two markets are ranked based on their alternative reward-to-risk ratios, almost all of the countries in the top (bottom) quartile are emerging (developed) markets. The pooled means of the reward-to-risk ratios are also significantly higher for emerging markets. Both portfolio and regressions analysis reveal that there is a significantly positive relation between various reward-to-risk metrics and expected market returns.     

Why Have Debt Ratios Increased for Firms in Emerging Markets?

I study trends in capital structure between 1980 and 2004 in a sample of over 11,000 firms from 34 emerging markets. The average firm's market‐value debt ratio rose by 15 percentage points over this quarter century. I study how this rise in leverage was influenced by firm‐level factors and by the availability of debt financing at the country level. The central finding is that the increase in debt ratios can largely be attributed to changes in the characteristics of emerging market firms over this period. For the average firm, the most prominent determinants of capital structure – size, profitability, asset tangibility, and growth opportunities – all shifted in the direction implying a higher optimal level of debt. At the country level, increased financial development within the country is associated with lower debt ratios, but increased financial openness to foreign markets is associated with higher debt ratios.