4.4. Market-level characteristics: financial system and corporate governance
4.4.1. Financial system characteristics
The results reported in Table 5 suggest that distinct characteristics of financial systems in Asia likely
play an important role in explaining the relative magnitude of the asset growth effect. In this section, we
look more directly into how markets differ in several macro-level financial system characteristics and how
they are related to the asset growth effect. Specifically, we consider the following characteristics of a
financial system:
• Loan/GDP is the ratio of the year-end total amount of loans outstanding extended by banks and other
deposit-taking institutions to the GDP. The aggregate bank loan data is obtained from CEIC Database,
which provides macro-economic, industrial, and financial time-series data on Asia and the U.S. The
GDP data are obtained from World Economic Outlook Databases of the International Monetary Fund.
• Market/GDP is the ratio of the aggregate stock market capitalization to GDP. The data sources are CRSP,
PACAP, and DataStream.
• ImpEquity is the importance of equity market. It is the average rank across three variables: (1) the ratio of
the aggregate stock market capitalization held by minorities to GNP; (2) the number of listed domestic
firms relative to the population; and (3) the number of IPOs relative to the population. A higher (lower)
score indicates greater (less) importance of the stock market. This measure is obtained from Pincus et al.
(2007).
• Bank-based (Bank) is an indicator that takes 1 if a market has a bank-based financial system and 0 if it has
a stock market-based system. We decide whether an economy has a bank or market based financial
system based on the importance of equity market. Using the median score of ImpEquity reported in
Pincus et al. (2007) as a benchmark, if an economy's score of importance of equity is greater (lower) than
the benchmark, we consider it as a market (bank)-based system.12
Not tabulated in the paper, we find that except for Indonesia and Korea, all other markets in Asia
have Loan/GDP ratios higher than the U.S., indicating a relatively important role of banks in Asia. China,
Hong Kong, and Malaysia have a Loan/GDP ratio higher than 1. The average Loan/GDP ratio across all
Asian markets is 1.02 vs. 0.31 for the U.S., with a significant difference of 0.71 (t= 4.65). In contrast, the
difference of Market/GDP ratio between the Asian and the U.S. market is not significant. The average
relative importance of equity weighted by a market's aggregate capitalization, of the Asian economies
is 17.3 while the relative importance of equity of the U.S. market is 23.3. The difference is −6.0,
significant at the 1% level. We also examine the specific types of financial systems (bank or capital
market) in each market. Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the U.S. have a market-based financial
system, and equity financing contributes a major portion to total asset growth in these countries. In
addition, we find that the monthly return spread is positively correlated with Loan/GDP and the
indicator of bank-based financial system and negatively correlated with the importance of equity
market.