Review of Development Finance最新文献

In a sample of 686 investable firms from 26 emerging market countries, I show that equity market liberalizations do not result in an increase in externally-financed growth rates for participating firms. In fact I find mostly to the contrary. These findings are in line with recent work which shows that firms issue less and not more equity capital post-liberalization, and suggest the gains from equity market liberalizations may not be attributable to a reduction in financing constraints.

We examine the pricing of currency risk and market integration in the equity markets of Nigeria and South Africa. Using the Generalized Method of Moments with a multi-beta asset pricing model and firm-level data, we find that currency risk is partly unconditionally priced in South Africa's stock market, with this market being largely integrated with the world equity markets. Conversely, currency risk is not priced in Nigeria's equity market, which also shows no evidence of integration with the world equity markets. Interestingly, a portfolio analysis of firms reveals a size based return sensitivity to both world equity markets and exchange rate volatility across the two countries. Therefore, while general results suggest that Nigeria, rather than South Africa, would provide greater diversification benefits to international investors with little or no worry about hedging unconditional exchange rate risk, that view must be nuanced when considering large size firms which are consistently sensitive to the two factors across both countries.

In this paper, we examine the interrelations between bank lending, macroeconomic conditions and financial uncertainty for an emerging economy, Malaysia. Adopting time series techniques of cointegration, causality and vector autoregressions (VARs), we arrive at the following main results. We note long run positive relations between real output and both real bank credits and real stock prices. However, with slow adjustment of real output in responses to credit expansion or stock price increase and weak exogeneity of the latter two variables, both credits and stock prices can be persistently higher than their fundamental values. The phenomenon can be detrimental since it heightens market uncertainty. Our results suggest that heightened market uncertainty is negatively related to output in the long run and, on the basis of dynamics analysis, it is likely to depress real output, real credit and real stock prices. At the same time, we note significant dynamic impacts of interest rate shocks on other variables. Taken together, these results have important implications for macroeconomic performance and stability for the case of Malaysia.

This paper assesses financial integration in Asia in terms of risk-sharing benefit versus financial contagion cost. We construct a new measure of risk sharing based on a term structure model, which allows identification of realized stochastic discount factors. Risk sharing is low in Asia, and varies across time and countries, whereas contagion risks are more significant intra-regionally, and relatively stable over the past decade. An overall tradeoff exists between risk sharing and contagion, but the terms of tradeoffs vary across countries, depending on relative economic fluctuations and inflation differentials. Asia therefore can potentially enhance risk sharing without raising contagion risk.

The performance of the banking sector is a subject that has received academic and policymaker attention in recent years. The rapid pace of the financial sector liberalization further accentuates policymakers’ interest in the topic. To date, studies examining the performance of the Asian banking sectors are numerous. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the impacts of banking sector restructuring and bank ownership issues, while empirical evidence on the impact of economic globalization is completely missing from the literature. In light of the knowledge gap, this study provides, for the first time, empirical evidence on the nexus between the level of globalization and the performance of the Indonesian banking sector during the period from 1999 to 2007.

The underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) represents one of the anomalies observed in primary markets worldwide, however, the depth and breadth of it varies from country to country, and sector to sector. This study is an empirical analysis of short run performance of IPOs in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Using data for 138 South African IPOs that were listed on the JSE from 2006 to 2010, we found significant short run underpricing. A sector wise analysis of three broad sectors indicated that the financial sector had the largest IPO underpricing, particularly evident in 2007. The year-wise analysis is also documented.

Economic liberalisation is characterised by the entry of foreign companies and the emergence of new domestic institutions to compete with the existing institutions of lending, and there is a view that the process leads to greater efficiency, especially because foreign banks bring new expertise. Extracting information from accounts lodged with Ghana Central Bank, this paper ranks the cost efficiency of banks, Theil decomposition of the cost efficiency scores allows for a comparison of performance between banks under different types of ownership. There is pronounced differences in efficiency scores within and between groups by type of ownership, but foreign ownership, per se, is not the determining factor.

Using a panel of 44 developed and developing countries, this paper analyzes the macro-environmental determinants of Internet financial reporting (IFR) within the context of corporate governance models, and thus, addresses the question of which governance model's disclosure demands are more associated with IFR. Both physical and institutional infrastructures are shown to be important determinants of a country's adoption of IFR. Along with the corporate governance structure, these infrastructures combine with IFR to enhance transparency and market efficiency, both major goals of financial reporting and disclosure. These findings point to requisite environmental infrastructures governments must provide or foster for firms within their confines to effectively adopt IFR and thus, reap the attendant benefits of disclosure. They also contribute to the debate on harmonization of international financial reporting by showing that requisite environmental infrastructures are a precondition for the success of any reporting system.

We propose a methodology for the assessment of potential demand and optimal supply for microcredit. We show that the total demand is a combination of the demand that stems from the active poor plus the demand generated by a motivator agent among the entrepreneurial non-motivated poor. We use French data to provide an illustration of the assessment of potential demand for microcredit. We also show that the proportion of the potential demand satisfied by a microfinance institution depends on its objective i.e. either it is socially oriented or a profit maximizer.

This paper revisits the issue of exchange rate regimes in emerging Asia over the decade 1999–2009. It finds that while Asia is home to a wide array of exchange rate regimes, there are signs of gradual movement toward somewhat greater exchange rate flexibility in many of the regional countries. There appears to be evidence of an apparent “fear of appreciation” which is manifested in asymmetric exchange rate intervention—i.e., a willingness to allow depreciations but reluctance to allow appreciations. This policy of effective exchange rate undervaluation is rather unorthodox from a neoclassical sense, but is consistent with a development policy centered on suppressing the price of non-tradable goods relative to tradables (i.e., real exchange rate undervaluation).