The difference between domestic and foreign creditor protections matters for investment decisions. The impact on cross-border investment in bonds is twofold. If domestic creditor protection is more efficient (less efficient) than foreign creditor protection, the sensitivity of foreign investment to creditor protection decreases (increases). Domestic creditor protection for foreign investment is more robust than creditor protection in destination countries, so investors with a high level of investor protection at home are less sensitive to investor protection in foreign countries.
What drives international equity and bond holdings? Under the assumption of perfectly
efficient capital markets, all investors should hold the same market-capitalization-weighted
portfolio, whereby the allocation of each investment corresponds to its weight in the world
market portfolio. If diversification costs exceed diversification benefits, home bias
arises. Law influences shareholder protection, agency cost control, and investor behavior,
but existing studies on foreign securities bias explore the importance of investor
protection for equity investments. The focus of this study is how domestic creditor
protection affects foreign investment decisions in debt markets.
A significant amount of previous work on investor protection investigates the effects on
financial market development—that is, the supply of securities, leaving the demand
side less explored. The author contributes to the existing literature on home bias by
exploring the demand relationship between domestic creditor protection and foreign
investment decisions in bond markets. It is unclear whether the results of previous equity
studies can be extended and expected to hold equally between equity and fixed-income
markets: Countries characterized by strong protection of shareholder rights are less
attractive to bondholders because they represent competing claims. The impact is probably
asymmetric because information is less relevant for bonds, which represent the payoff of a
fixed claim, than equities, which are the payoff of a residual claim.
Shareholders implicitly compare foreign and domestic creditor protections when determining
portfolio allocations to foreign securities, but several concepts have evolved that relate
shareholder protection to foreign investment. The “good country bias” theory
implies that portfolio investors in countries with weak shareholder protection invest more
in foreign stocks than do portfolio investors in countries with stronger protection of their
rights. It is likewise intuitive that investors in countries where their rights are well
protected are less likely to diversify their portfolios abroad. The “comparative
corporate governance” theory is based on the assumption that the driver of foreign
investment decisions is based on the relative strength of foreign investor protection
compared with domestic investor protection. This study is an extension of both the
“good corporate governance” theory, which focuses on absolutes, and the
“comparative corporate governance” theory, which focuses on relatives. It shows
that the impact of domestic creditor protection on cross-border investment is twofold and
involves an interaction effect. Foreign portfolio composition is indirectly affected by
domestic corporate governance.
Over the last several decades, corporate governance literature has highlighted the
importance of the institutional environment in which investing takes place. The environment
for investor protection is generally viewed in terms of such national-level factors as the
legal framework for property rights and the credibility of a country’s judicial
system in enforcing laws against white-collar crime, malfeasance, corruption, and
expropriation. The institutional literature has been advanced through comparative studies
that examine the relative underweighting or overweighting of assets to a theoretical optimal
benchmark. Such studies often split the universe of investors into inside and outside
investors to test whether corporate governance evenly affects all portfolio investors or
instead is particularly relevant to foreign investors.
The author follows existing literature by analyzing the annual cross-border investment of
22 major developed and 15 developing countries over 2004–2012. She computes measures
of foreign bias by using data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF)—the most comprehensive and widely used datasets,
though not perfect. Indexes of creditor rights attempt to distinguish between the existence
and the enforcement of creditor protection laws. Creditor rights are complicated by the fact
that heterogeneity exists within bondholders as a group. Senior creditors may prefer
liquidation, which guarantees repayment of their claims, whereas junior bondholders may
favor “going concern” solutions. Creditor protection is further complicated by
distinctions between sovereign debt markets and corporate debt markets. The author uses the
ordinary least-squares method as the main estimation technique to measure and account for
time effects across both pre-crisis and crisis periods.
In these globalizing times, a leading question in corporate law is whether there exists a
national corporate governance system with a comparative advantage or whether national
corporate governance systems will converge to a new hybrid of the best practices drawn from
different systems. Comparative governance, however, is subjective and has a reactive
quality. In the 1990s, US observers looked to Japan’s governance practices for
guidance, but US competitiveness rebounded; today, ironically, there is talk of US-style
reform in Japan. It is difficult for studies of comparative data to establish causal
connections. In addition, the author does not address how culture and patriotism affect
portfolio allocation decisions.