5.2. Shareholder rights
LLSV (1998) also provide a number of more detailed indices for particular aspects of corporate governance, such as shareholder rights, creditor rights, and accounting standards. Data on shareholder or “anti-director” rights are available for all the countries in our sample except the five transition economies. Data on creditor rights are not available for the five transition economies and Venezuela. Data on accounting standards are not available for the five transition countries and Indonesia.
We look at each measure in turn and also evaluate the product of these rights and three measures of contract enforceability. Rights on paper are good, but we are particularly interested in evaluating the implications of how these rights are enforced. We use a very simple measure, the product of legal de jure rights and the enforceability of these rights. Because it is hard to know exactly how rights are enforced we use the three indices of general legal environment used in the previous section: judicial efficiency, corruption, and the rule of law. This enables us to check for a robust pattern in the data.
Table 3 shows the LLSV (1998) aggregate index of minority shareholder rights on a scale of zero to six, which they call “anti-director” rights. Asian countries show a wide range of values, with lower scores in countries that experienced greater depreciation: Indonesia scores a two on this index, while Malaysia scores a four and Hong Kong scores a five. On the other hand, Mexico and Venezuela, with much less depreciation, have even lower scores than Indonesia.
Table 5 shows that this variable is significant at the 10% level with and without the East Asia dummy. A one-point increase in this index implies a 6% smaller depreciation from 1997 to 1998. The R-squared is 0.13. When we include foreign exchange reserves, the index of shareholder rights keeps its significance at the 10% level and reserves are not significant. Including import coverage gives the same result: shareholder rights are significant at the 10% and the macroeconomic control variable is not significant.
For the product of anti-director rights and judicial efficiency, the regression coefficient is significant in all three of the usual specifications. The adjusted R-squared is consistently 0.22–0.23. Using the product of anti-director rights and corruption or the product of anti-director rights and the rule of law gives similar results. Using import coverage rather than reserves does not make the governance variable insignificant in any specification, and in one case (the product of corruption and anti-director rights), the effect is to make the governance variable significant at the 5% level.
The LLSV (1998) index of creditor rights shows that several countries with relatively high creditor rights experience a great deal of depreciation, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Korea (Table 3). Table 5 shows that there is no significant relation between creditor rights and the exchange rate depreciation; the R-squared is only 0.003. The product of creditor rights and the efficiency of the judiciary or the corruption index does not give a significant result. There also does not appear to be any kind of relation between exchange rate depreciation and accounting standards ( Table 5).
5.3. Robustness checks
We check our results using money growth in 1996 as an alternative macroeconomic control variable. If we drop Turkey, then the legal environment (judiciary, rule of law, and corruption) variables remain significant at close to their original levels (the corruption variable slips slightly) and money growth is not significant. The only variable to lose its significance is the index of anti-director rights. If we include Turkey, all the corporate governance variables, except anti-director rights, remain significant and money growth is significant at the 5% level.
We also include a dummy variable for Latin America which is one for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela in our sample. This does not affect the significance of any of the governance variables and is itself insignificant in all the exchange rate regressions. The Latin America dummy is negative, with a coefficient of around −30 in the stock market regressions, but the only effect on governance variables is to make corruption insignificant. Total reserves become positive and significant in the stock market regression; the other results for macroeconomic variables are not affected.
For robustness checks, we examine the results using sample periods ending in March 1998, August 1998, or September 1998. The same corporate governance results hold for these periods. Controlling for the size of IMF packages (either pledged or actually disbursed) does not affect the significance of the governance variables. Controlling for combinations of macroeconomic variables also does not make any of our governance variables insignificant. (These results are available