Boletín Hemerográfico Vol. 2 Num. 3 julio-septiembre 2006:Revistas electrónicas

VOL. 2 NUM. 03 / JULIO - SEPTIEMBRE 2006

Real and Financial Aspects of Financial Integration - Papers drawn from the 3rd INFINITI conference on International Financial Integration, held at the Institute for International Integration Studies, Trinity College, Dublin, June 2005

We investigate the intertemporal linkages between foreign direct investment and disaggregated measures of international trade. We outline a model exemplifying these linkages, describe methods for investigating two-way feedbacks between various categories of trade, and apply them to recent data. We find that the strongest feedback between the sub-accounts is between FDI and manufacturing trade. For the first time, we decompose causality using Geweke's [Geweke, J. (1982). Measurement of linear dependence and feedback between multiple time series. Journal of the American Statistical Association 77(378), 304–313] decomposition method. We find that most of the linear feedback between trade and FDI can be accounted for by Granger-causality from FDI gross flows to trade openness (50%) and from trade to FDI (31%).

Recent research finds evidence for convergence among the North American equity markets and argues that this is generated by the North Atlantic Free Trade Accord (NAFTA). In this paper, we re-examine these conclusions and show that the documented cointegration property among the NAFTA equity markets was in fact confined to a sub-period in the late 1990s. We argue that the comovement was caused by the global boom in information technology shares and the resulting change in the sector mix of the value-weighted benchmark indexes used in prior work. We present evidence supporting this alternative hypothesis using an updated data set that includes global industry indexes. Our results have implications for transmission of information across global equity markets and international portfolio diversification.

We investigate the integration of euro-zone retail banking markets by comparing convergence and cointegration measures. As an innovation to the literature convergence measures are exposed to a difference-in-differences methodology which allows both, identifying the impact of the single currency and benchmarking euro zone-specific from global integration effects. We find that euro-zone convergence has largely been a result of integrating wholesale markets after the elimination of exchange rate risks. After 1999 integration is mainly observed for a restricted “convergence club” excluding Germany, Ireland and Belgium. Moreover, convergence is at least partly a global rather than euro zone-specific process.

We test for convergence – à la Massmann and Mitchell [Massmann, M., & Mitchell, J. (2004). Reconsidering the evidence: Are Euro area business cycles converging? Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis, 1(3), 275–307] – among the industrial sectors of some APEC members—Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the U.S. and Canada for January 1971–March 2004; and, Australia, Japan and South Korea for 1957:01–2003:04. We conclude that business-cycle convergence is far from complete. We also reject convergence in the stock and exchange rate markets. A less stringent definition of co-movement, due to Vahid and Engle [Vahid, F., & Engle, R. (1993). Common trends and common cycles. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 8(4), 341–360], provides evidence of common cycles in the industrial sectors of Australia, Japan and South Korea, and in the stock and exchange rate markets of developed and growth-competitive economies belonging to APEC.

In this paper, we investigate financial spillovers between stock markets during calm and turbulent periods. We explicitly define financial spillovers and financial contagion in accordance with the literature and construct statistical models corresponding to these definitions in a Markov switching framework. Applying the new testing methodology based on transition matrices, we find that spillovers from the US stock market to the UK, Japanese and German markets are more frequent when the latter markets are in a crisis regime. However, we reject the hypothesis of strong financial contagion from the US to the other markets.

Using the change in ordinary dividend payout as a proxy for improved governance, we show that cross-listing in the U.S. is associated with enhanced protection for the minority ordinary shareholders of exchange-listed non-U.S. firms. These firms substitute dividends for enhanced governance. We find no such effect for Rule 144a Portal firms. Interestingly, we document evidence inconsistent with the legal bonding hypothesis for Level 1 OTC firms. We believe that their ability to pay lower dividends post-listing is primarily due to their ability to credibly commit to fair treatment of their minority investors, given their record for equitable treatment of their ordinary shareholders. They achieve this reputation by consistently paying out a sizable proportion of their earnings as dividends. In addition, we find that the firm-level governance of Level 1 OTC firms, as measured by the number of closely held shares improves in the post-listing period. We find no such effect for SEC Rule 144a traded firms. Our results have also important implications for the agency models of dividends.

This paper considers a firm that can engage in partially relationship specific investments. The firm does not have the option to engage in investments that are not at all relationship specific. I show that, in such a setting, equilibrium investment may exceed the socially optimal level. This is contrary to the intuition obtained from standard idiosyncratic (i.e., relationship-specific) investment models, in which the possibility of “hold-up” leads to underinvestment. The driving force behind this result is that when assets are only partially relationship-specific, marginal investment may yield higher benefits when transacting with the market at large even though cumulative investment yields higher benefits within a bilateral relationship. This finding is relevant to many bilateral relationships in which investments that are targeted to improve the joint payoff of the relationship inevitably have spillover effects that improve the payoff of transacting with the market.