TY - JOUR AU - Bekaert,Geert AU - Harvey,Campbell R. AU - Lumsdaine,Robin L. TI - The Dynamics of Emerging Market Equity Flows JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 7219 PY - 1999 Y2 - July 1999 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7219 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7219.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Geert Bekaert Graduate School of Business Columbia University 3022 Broadway, 411 Uris Hall New York, NY 10027 Tel: 212/854-9156 Fax: 212/662-8474 E-Mail: gb241@columbia.edu Campbell R. Harvey Duke University Fuqua School of Business Durham, NC 27708-0120 Tel: 919/660-7768 Fax: 919/660-8030 E-Mail: cam.harvey@duke.edu Robin L. Lumsdaine Kogod School of Business American University 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, DC 20016 Tel: 202/885-1964 E-Mail: robin.lumsdaine@american.edu AB - We study the interrelationship between capital flows, returns, dividend yields and world interest rates in 20 emerging markets. We estimate a vector autoregressionn with these variables to measure the degree to which lower interest rates contribute to increased capital flows and shocks in flows affect the cost of capital among other dynamic relations. We precede the VAR analysis by a detailed examination of endogenous break points in capital flows and the other variables. These structural breaks are traced to the liberalization of emerging equity markets. Our evidence of structural breaks call into question past research which estimates VAR models over the full sample. After a liberalization, we find that equity flows increase by 1.4% of market capitalization. We also show that shocks in equity flows initially increase returns which is consistent with a price pressure hypothesis. While the effect is diminished over time, there also appears to be a permenant impact. This is consistent with our finding that our proxy for the cost of capital, dividend yields, decreases. Finally, our analysis of the transitition dynamics from pre-liberalization to post-liberalization suggests that when capital leaves, it leaves faster than it came in. These results may help us understand the dynamics of the recent crises in Latin America and East Asia. ER -