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.