In most of these instances, management was able to transfer cash other assets out of a company with outside investors, perhaps to pay the management’s personal debts, to shore up another company with different shareholders, or to go straight into a foreign bank account. The fact that management in most emerging markets is also the controlling shareholder makes these transfers easier to achieve. The downturns in these countries have been associated with significantly more expropriation of cash and tangible assets by managers.
Our results highlight the importance of the legal protection afforded creditors and minority shareholders and are closely linked to the recent findings of La Porta et al. (1997,1998,1999b), hereafter referred to as LLSV. These authors show that the extent to which creditor and minority shareholder rights are protected explains a great deal of the variation in how firms are funded and owned across countries. In particular, LLSV (1997) provide evidence from a sample of 49 countries that weak shareholder rights and poor enforcement lead to underdeveloped stock markets. Here we show that weak enforcement shareholder rights has first-order importance in determining the extent of exchange rate depreciation and stock market collapse in 1997-98
Related ideas have been expressed by Yellen (1998), Rajan and Zingales(1998), and Caballero and Krishnamurthy (1998). Yellen argues that “a ‘relationships’ model of capital allocation is extraordinarily susceptible to a deterioration in peroeptions about the quality of investment decisions.” Rajan and Zingales explain the problems that can occur when a relationship-based financial system is opened up to capital inflows. Caballero and Krishnamurthy emphasize the underinvestment in appropriate collateral that occurs due to incentive problems.
Section 2 presents the assumptions and implications of our model. Section 3 explains our sources and data on exchange rate depreciation and stock market
declines during the Asian crisis. Section 4 briefly assesses the ability of standard macroeconomic measures to explain the magnitude of depreciation in 1997-98. Section 5 shows that measures of corporate governance provide a better explanation for the extent of exchange rate depreciation, and Section 6 assesses both macroeconomic and corporate governance explanations for stock market performance in 1997-98. Section 7 concludes by evaluating the relative strength of corporate governance and macroeconomic explanations for what happened in the Asian crisis.