Investor Protection and Corporate Governance

Latin America has been surprisingly spared from a generalized wave of corporate governance scandals. One possible explanation is that the region's level of investor protection is adequate. The evidence from the papers in this book says otherwise. The still relatively low level of protection and transparency has created an environment where problems cannot be easily detected or are not worth pursuing. These circumstances have started to push firms thirsty for capital to unilaterally opt for better corporate governance and alleviate this disadvantage. The papers in this book constitute the largest firm-level corporate governance analysis undertaken across Latin American countries. The new datasets in the book allow the researchers to conclude that companies with better self-imposed firm-level governance practices or with listing in U.S. markets are given higher valuations and can raise capital at a lower cost. Although these results are encouraging, they point to a rocky path for the future growth of local Latin American capital markets.

Alberto Chong is a researcher at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). Florencio López de Silanes is a Professor at the Yale School of Management and is a researcher with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).