NBER Working Papers by Stephan Siegel

At a time of historic challenges to the viability of the Eurozone, we assess the contribution of the EU and the Euro to equity market integration in Europe. We use a simple and essentially model free measure of bilateral market segmentation: two countries are segmented if there is a wide divergence in the valuations of their industries. We first establish that segmentation is significantly lower for EU versus non- EU members. Bilateral valuation differentials remain lower for EU members even after we control for several possible channels of integration, such as bilateral trade, direct investment positions, financial regulation, and interest rate differences. Importantly, we find that EU membership reduces equity market segmentation between member countries whether or not members have also ...

We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many developing countries, the level of segmentation is still significant. In contrast to previous research, we characterize the factors that account for variation in market segmentation both through time as well as across countries. While a country's regulation with respect to foreign capital flows is important in determining its level of segmentation, we find that non-regulatory factors are also related to the cross-sectional and time-series variation in the level of segmentation. We identify a country's political risk profile and its stock market development as two additional local segmentation factors as well as the U.S. corporate credit spread as a global...

We measure a country's growth opportunities by investigating how its industry mix is priced in global capital markets, using price earnings ratios of global industry portfolios. We derive three sets of empirical results. First, these exogenous growth opportunities strongly predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This relation is strongest in countries that have liberalized their capital accounts, equity markets, and banking systems. Second, we re-examine the link between financial development, investor protection, capital allocation, and growth. We find that financial development and investor protection measures are much less important in aligning growth opportunities with growth than is capital market openness. Third, we formulate new tests of mark...