This study examines the relation between bank relations and market performance in Thailand, an economy in which commercial banks play a crucial role through lending relationship and, for a number of companies, equity ownership. Overall, bank relationships, both equity-based and debt-based, positively affect capital investment. However, there is a negative relation between lending relationships, both short-term and long-term, and market performance indicating that bank lending may not always be consistent with value maximization. There is also evidence of a positive marginal effect of bank monitoring through equity ownership on market performance. Further, the relation between bank equity ownership and market performance appears to be non-linear with a concave function. Ownership by corporate insiders is also negatively related to bank equity ownership. Overall, the findings highlight the detrimental effects of excessive short-term debt usage, one of the factors believed to contribute to the financial crisis in Thailand, and the marginal benefit of the equity-based relationship on firm value. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2004.

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We analyze U.S.-based emerging market bond funds over a ten-year (1996-2005) complete cycle of ups and downs in the dominant emerging bond markets. Emerging market bond funds outperform comparable domestic and global bond funds. The results are robust across both conditional and unconditional models. The funds also provide international diversification benefits to U.S. and international bond and equity portfolios. The funds exhibit persistence in performance and seasonality. Active funds, large funds and funds with high minimum purchases perform better on a total return basis but not on a risk-adjusted basis. Copyright 2008, The Eastern Finance Association.

This study examines the effect of managerial ownership on firm value in capital markets where outside governance mechanisms to discipline managers are weak or non-existent. We hypothesize that strong market forces in the U.S. confound the effect of managerial ownership on firm value, i.e., the convergence of interest argument. We test the hypothesis using data from 112 firms from Singapore Stock Exchange and 205 firms from the Stock Exchange of Thailand prior to the Asian financial crisis in 1997 when the market forces were weak, yet the investor protection was sufficient to prevent outright appropriation from management. For ease of comparison, we use methodologies from studies done on the U.S. sample firms during the same study period as ours. We find that, both in Singapore and Thailand, firm value is a function of managerial ownership, and the relation is of the famous inverted U-shaped. Moreover, the relation is robust under different model specifications. The results from Thai sample, with weaker market forces than in Singapore, lend support to many agency cost hypotheses advanced in the U.S. Our results provide useful implication for investors in emerging and frontier markets where outside governance mechanisms are yet to be fully developed.