Global Economy Journal

With increasing globalization, to what extent do stock market returns reflect global or domestic risk factors? We find a significant relationship between stock market returns and the global market risk factor and macroeconomic factors respectively. In particular, global factors offer four times more explanatory power than domestic factors for developed market stock returns. Yet domestic factors are as important as global ones in emerging economies. Our method allows for the proxies of the state variables to be endogenously determined. The relationship between macroeconomy and stock market returns is robust after accounting for the market factor, firm size and book-to-market characteristics.

One of the many definitions of financial globalization is integration of domestic financial system of a country with the global financial markets and institutions. Enabling framework of financial globalization essentially includes liberalization and deregulation of the domestic financial sector as well as liberalization of the capital account. As economies progressively integrate globally, pari passu the financial structures of markets and the world of finance change. Financial globalization cannot be considered a novel phenomenon. Trans-country capital movements are centuries old.

The oil shock of 1973 and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, both of these developments were momentous and were responsible for laying the foundation of the contemporary era of financial globalization. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, some middle-income developing economies began to liberalize and open up for greater capital mobility, while keeping an autonomous control over their monetary policy. Advances in IT and computer technology are cited as one of the most important factors driving and supporting financial globalization. Transnational corporations (TNCs) also helped in global financial integration. They expanded their networks by merging with or acquiring other national and international firms. The prime movers in financial globalization are governments, borrowers, investors, and financial institutions. Each one of these market participants propelled economies towards financial integration in a proactive manner.

Financial globalization has caused dramatic changes in the structure of national and international capital markets. The most significant change in the capital markets was in the banking system, which went through a process of dis-intermediation. This was a market transformation of fundamental nature.

Contagions and crises are the downsides of financial globalization. Economic and financial crises of the 1990s portend to the fact that financial globalization is not a win-win game, and that it can potentially lead to serious disorder and high cost in terms of bank failures, corporate bankruptcies, stock market turbulence, depletion of foreign exchange reserves, currency depreciation and increased fiscal burden. A unique characteristic of globalized financial markets is reversal of capital flows when market perception regarding the creditworthiness of the borrowing entity changes.

Cross-country financial flows to the emerging market economies were low, at during the mid-1970s. They increased at a healthy clip during the decades of 1980s and 1990s, peaking in 1997. They suffered a sharp decline after that because of the Asian and Russian financial and economic crises. The composition of external capital underwent a dramatic transformation during this period. Official flows either stagnated or declined. As a result their relative significance in global capital flows dwindled. In their place, private capital flows became the major source of external finance for a good number of emerging market economies. FDI became an important and dependable source of finance for the emerging markets and other middle-income economies during the decade of the 1980s and 1990s. Portfolio investment in stocks and bond markets also increased substantially. Global institutional investors found this channel of investment functional and profitable. Mutual funds, insurance companies, and pension funds channeled large amounts through portfolio investment into the emerging market economies.

As financial globalization progressed, presence of international financial intermediaries has expanded considerably. This applies more to international commercial banks than to investment banks, insurance companies and mutual funds. It is incorrect to say that their global expansion has been uniform because this has occurred unevenly. International bond issuance activity by emerging market economies recorded a sharp spurt in 1993. Emerging market economies began using ADRs and GDRs for raising capital from the global capital markets in 1990 in a small way.

In the early 2000s, many developing countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia presented substantial corporate dollar debts. This paper suggests an explanation for this worrisome phenomenon, which builds on the traditional signaling approach. The model brings into the picture specific institutional characteristics of the credit market in these countries. If lenders have no direct possibility to infer a firm's financial status, sound firms might want to borrow dollars and bear a high clearance cost -- connected to the grant procedure -- just in order to signal their type. The success of this policy depends on the behavior of bad firms. When dollar borrowing clearance costs are relatively small with respect to the clearance cost of borrowing in the local currency, the whole corporate sector would opt for liability dollarization. In this most inefficient case, the signaling effect vanishes, while all firms bear high clearance costs. We also put forward the necessary conditions for a separating equilibrium to occur.

The author, a linguist, explores how "trust," "confidence," and "reliance" underlie global trade and finance.

To do this, he demonstrates the contribution that linguistic research has made to the understanding of the meaning of these words, in referring particularly to the work of the French Sanskrit specialist Emile Benvéniste.

Recalling the archeology of the images and representations that former civilizations have associated with these words, the author undertakes a detailed semantic history.

The analysis that theologians and philosophers have performed on these notions is the occasion to show that the inquiry into the question of confidence is related to someone else's philosophy. Just as there is no more an objective knowledge of others any more than there is an objective knowledge of God, the convictions acquired relative to others or to God are of a different order than that of pure reason. Thus the notion of confidence implies by nature the notion of risk.

The author aims to show that if the contemporary problematics are of a different nature than those whose words represent the vestige, nothing however in these problematics is foreign to the human experience that these words convey: only the fields of application and the reasons of the inquiry have changed with time.

15th Presidential Address, presented at international conference, Istanbul, Turkey, May 2005.

In a two-country world for a product which in the absence of trade is provided by a monopoly in each country, opening trade effectively creates a world duopoly rather than two separate country monopolies. Suppose the goods produced in the competing countries differ in quality because the firm's home market sizes differ and quality is chosen before trade opens. Our results suggest that consumers benefit in free trade both from the choice of qualities and from the price competition. Social surplus for both countries is higher in trade than autarky—and although normally firms lose due to the increased competition, occasionally one of the firms may actually gain in trade. The competition between firms means that the trade price is less than the autarky price, but sales increase, sometimes enough to offset the price effects.

In December 1993, restrictions to foreign ownership across major Mexican economic sectors were abolished. This paper studies output, industrialization intensity, "international infrastructure", and government expenditures on infrastructure as determinants of FDI inflows into Mexican states over 1994-2001. We conduct a "general to specific" estimation strategy across Mexican states. Telephone lines appear to be very important to FDI as their coefficients are around 2.0 in Random Effects Models. Industrialization is also important, with coefficients varying from 0.62 to 0.67. Allowing for endogeneity between FDI and real output, dynamic GMM panels confirm the robust effects of telephone lines on FDI. International infrastructure thus appears more conducive to FDI than domestic infrastructure, such as interstate and secondary roads. With international infrastructure being a major catalyst of FDI inflows into Mexico, we provide support to ongoing conventional wisdom promoting such type of investment.

Research has often focused on how foreign direct investment (FDI) transfers technology from developed economies to less developed economies. Most FDI occurs between developed economies, however, and the country receiving the greatest inflow of FDI is the United States. This paper examines whether such FDI inflows have stimulated growth of the U.S. economy. We apply time-series data to a simultaneous-equation model (SEM) that explicitly captures the bi-directional relationship between FDI and U.S. economic growth. FDI is found to have a significant, positive, and economically important impact on U.S. growth. Also, our SEM estimates reveal that FDI growth is income inelastic. These results imply that: (1) even a technologically advanced country such as the U.S. benefits from FDI, (2) the gains from FDI are very substantial in the long run, and (3) the sustainability of the U.S. current account deficit is enhanced by FDI's positive effect on productivity but undermined by the income inelasticity of FDI. Overall, the results suggest that U.S. policies should focus on keeping the country attractive to foreign direct investors.