Country level corruption and frequency of issue in the U.S. market

Abstract

This paper examines if country level corruption affects the size of a country’s stock market and its ability to raise equity capital. Using Transparency International’s ranking of countries based on corruption levels, we relate the corruption index to total market capitalization for a sample of 104 countries and also examine the number and volume of new equity issues in each country across time. Additionally, we examine if corruption affects the frequency of foreign firms’ raising capital in the U.S. We find that the corruption index is not highly correlated to either the number of issues or the total volume of issue. The correlation between the average volume of issue and the TI index suggests that there is no clear cut relation between the corruption index and the likelihood of the firm raising capital abroad.