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We find a significant curvilinear relation between Japanese firm value and the percentage of equity held by foreign investors. Firm value rises until foreign ownership reaches approximately 40%, and then it begins to decline. It appears that large foreign institutional investors invest in well-performing firms and serve as effective monitors. Our results remain robust even after controlling for other corporate governance variables, such as equity ownership by main banks and board membership by foreign investors. It seems that most of the increase in firm value and the performance improvement are due to rising levels of equity ownership in non-keiretsu (independent) firms by foreign investors. We also show that an increase in foreign ownership is correlated with a rise in R&D expenditures, suggesting that foreign institutional investors contribute to the long-term viability and competitiveness of Japanese firms.

Purpose – Examine the role of institutional investors in accelerating the development of capital markets and economies abroad, the determinants of their investment, both in the domestic and foreign markets, and their importance in promoting good corporate governance practices worldwide and facilitating increased financial integration.

Methodology/approach – Review and synthesize recent academic literature (1970–2011) on the process of international financial integration and the role of foreign institutional investors in the increasingly global financial markets.

Findings – Despite the concern that short-term flow of international capital can be destructive to the emerging and developing market economies, academic evidence on a destabilizing effect of foreign investment activity is limited. Institutional investors’ systematic preference for stocks of large, well-known, globally visible foreign firms can explain the presence of a home bias in international portfolio investment.

Research limitations – Given the breadth of the two literature streams, only representative studies (over 45 published works) are summarized.

Social implications – Regulators of emerging markets should first improve domestic institutions, governance, and macroeconomic fundamentals, and then deregulate domestic financial and capital markets to avoid economic and financial crises in the initial stages of liberalization reforms.

Originality/value of paper – A useful source of information for graduate students, academics, and practitioners on the importance of foreign institutional investors.

Our paper presents an extension of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model of bank runs to an open market economy. We examine domestic banks that are subject to potential runs by domestic depositors who worry that they will not be able to be repaid in full, because the domestic banks may not be able to refinance in the international financial markets. A loss in confidence in the banking system might precipitate a bank run. A bank run might be costly to safety net guarantors, for example, the central bank. Further, a bank run might lead to a breaking of the fixed exchange rate. Our model shows that adding central bank and International Monetary Fund guarantees, increasing long term debt as well as more equity financing reduces financial fragility, but consistent with economic intuition, these policy levers cannot eliminate the possibility of a bank run or a banking crisis leading to a currency crisis.

The paper uses 101 years of Chilean and international financial assets returns to investigate mean-variance optimal portfolio allocations. The key conclusion is that the share of international unhedged investments is substantial even in minimum risk portfolios (20%), unless the period 1980–2002 is assumed to be drawn from a different distribution and previous history is disregarded. In addition to that, the paper finds that mean-variance optimal investors would have generated substantial demand for an asset replicating the return profile of an efficient pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Labour income and departures from log-normality of returns might, however, affect the latter conclusion.

Purpose – Investigate the causes and consequences of foreign financial institutions' divestments in China's banking sector which is an example of cross-border transactions by institutional investors.

Methodology – Use a sample of 26 foreign financial institutions' strategic investments in Chinese banks. Ten of those investments are divested after the global financial crisis. We investigate determinants of the divestment, business cooperation after the divestment, and Chinese banks' stock price reactions to the divestment announcement.

Findings – The poor performance of foreign financial institutions, which is attributable to the global financial crisis, and the institutions' regulated low equity ownership are important causes of divestment (or whole divestment). In contrast, Chinese banks' poor performance does not cause foreign divestments. Foreign financial institutions that fully divest their equity stakes usually terminate their cooperative business, which was required by the strategic investment agreement. The Bank of China and the China Construction Bank, which experienced large H-share divestments, experienced large economic declines in A-share values.

Social implications – Foreign financial institutions' strategic investments created substantial shareholder value before the divestment. Banking sector developments that rely on foreign investments are vulnerable to economic downturns in developed countries.

Originality/value of paper – To the best of our knowledge, this is the first trial to analyze the impact of divestments on divested bank performance.

The increased market share of foreign investment trusts in Japan may be attributed to the fact that Japanese managers have dramatically underperformed benchmarks. Recently, we showed that this underperformance can be attributed to a unique Japanese tax environment. Using data from 1998 though 2001, we find that Japanese and foreign managers are becoming very similar in style and performance. However, Japanese managers suffered in the immediate aftermath of a major April 2000 revision in the tax code. We attribute this result to the huge inflow of new money into this sector and the style shifts necessary to accommodate this flow.

Liability of foreignness (LOF) has been one of the central constructs in the field of international business and management. Over the past two decades, a significant body of theoretical and empirical research has accumulated, theorizing on the sources of these LOFs, investigating their magnitude, and prescribing approaches to mitigate these disadvantages. However, much of this research is almost exclusively related to firms expanding their products, services, and operations to other countries as part of their global expansion. The difficulties firms face in foreign product markets is just one dimension of the costs they can face in their attempts to secure resources abroad.

We expand the domain of the LOF construct to include liabilities faced by firms accessing foreign capital markets in light of the increasing integration of capital markets. We identify four sources of LOF in capital markets: regulatory costs, information costs, unfamiliarity costs, and costs arising out of cultural differences. Based on an extensive review of “home bias” in equity markets, we propose four strategies to erase the legitimacy deficits that firms encounter in foreign capital markets: bonding, signaling, adoption of business practices isomorphic with the host country, and certifications and endorsements by third parties. We also offer suggestions for operationalizing and measuring LOF in capital markets as well as several directions for advancing further research on LOF in the context of capital markets.

This chapter contributes to the existing literature on institutional theory and international business research by integrating the concepts of polycentrism and institutional learning to examine how MNEs from emerging economies invest in developed countries. We argue that equity-based market entry modes and non-equity-based modes create different needs for learning about economic, regulatory and political institutions; entry modes with or without local partners lead to different levels of institutional embeddedness and institutional learning speeds. Finally, the content of institutional knowledge also determines its transferability and adaptability. We emphasize the importance of recognizing the integrated nature of economic, regulatory and political institutions from a polycentric perspective and discuss their change in different situations.

To date there is little understanding of the factors that impact the survival of foreign IPOs after they list on US stock exchanges. In this study, we examine how foreign IPO survival is contingent on institutional factors associated with the firm’s home country. We also explore how corporate governance and organizational identity influence the survival of foreign IPOs in the United States. Results suggest that the US institutional environment supports foreign firms with more independent and professional leadership, and that knowledge-intense organizations have higher chances of long-term success after listing on US exchanges.