Dr. San Martín-Mosqueira, Pablo

Improvements in transparency at the country level have modified the relevance of bank debt maturity as a control mechanism. The novelty of this research is that we provide empirical evidence that the maturity of bank borrowing is contingent on the characteristics of the regulatory and the institutional setting about corporate governance. The main implication of our paper is that corporate governance rules have greater influence in civil-law countries than in common-law countries in promoting efficiency in the use of bank debt maturity. The value of this paper is that our results confirm that the implementation of similar regulations on transparency across countries with different legal systems favors the alignment of the role played by short-term bank debt in addressing asymmetric information, agency costs, and inefficient liquidation.

The goal of this paper, which follows a corporate governance approach, is to assess whether within country changes in governance (e.g. in legal and regulatory systems and financial development) and changes in corporate ownership concentration can predict a change in the value of Latin American firms. Using fixed-effect panel data models with a representative sample of firms for the period from 1997 to 2013, we observe that the investors’ rights and their legal protection as well as the rule of law are associated with a premium in the firm market value. Contrary to what was expected, in immature financial markets, as found in Latin America, firms take advantage of both the asymmetries of information and the multiple market frictions to be overvalued. So, as the financial system develops, firm value drops. At the firm-level, results confirm the hypothesis of the expropriation of minority shareholders.