8. Conclusions
We present empirical evidence that stock returns are more synchronous in
emerging economies than in developed economies. We show that this result is
not an artifact of structural characteristics of economies, such as market size,
fundamentals volatility, country size, economy diversi"cation, or the co-movement
of "rm-level fundamentals. Though some of these factors contribute to
stock return synchronicity, a large residual e!ect remains, and this e!ect is
correlated with measures of institutional development.
In particular, less respect for private property by government is associated
with more market-wide stock price variation, and therefore also with more
synchronous stock price movements. Since these market-wide price #uctuations
are uncorrelated with fundamentals, we conjecture that poor property rights
protection might deter risk arbitrage and, in the words of De Long et al. (1990),
`create spacea for noise traders. However, since we may be controlling for
fundamentals volatility imperfectly, we cannot rule out other explanations.
We also show that, in developed economies, providing public shareholders
with stronger legal protection against corporate insiders is associated greater
"rm-speci"c returns variation, and so with lower synchronicity. We conjecture
that economies that protect public investors' property rights might discourage
intercorporate income-shifting by controlling shareholders. Better property
rights protection thus might render "rm-speci"c risk-arbitrage more attractive
in the stock markets of such economies.