An Empirical Study of Country Risk Adjustments to Market Multiples Valuation in Emerging Markets: the Case for Russia

Valuation in emerging markets is always a challenge. The existence of sovereign risk and capital market segmentation as well as small trading volumes and narrow domestic capital market make it difficult to identify peer companies for market multiples valuation without cross- border comparables. This paper investigates the practical implementation of market multiples valuation in emerging markets when the analyst should involve peer companies from developed markets. Companies with comparable operational parameters bear different values on different financial markets. The problem of unavoidable difference among national stock markets exists, that is why methods of cross-border multiples’ corrections are called for. We address cross-border corrections procedures for adjusting multiples to a sovereign risk to find out the role and the extent of these type of adjustments in valuation. We are using the samples of Russian and US companies to test three different adjustments’ techniques: the sovereign spread, the relative market coefficients and the regression approach.

Do Indirect Investment Barriers Contribute to Capital Market Segmentation?

Using a sample of emerging market closed-end funds, I find evidence that indirect investment barriers exert powerful effects on asset pricing differences across countries. I show that not only do indirect investment barriers contribute to international capital market segmentation, but also they can lead to segmentation even in the absence of strong capital inflow restrictions. This result is consistent with Bekaert and Harvey's (1995) conclusion that “other markets appear segmented even though foreigners have relatively free access to their capital markets” (p. 403). The empirical results of this paper provide a rational market segmentation explanation of both premiums and discounts in emerging market closed-end funds, and they are consistent with the deterrent effect of indirect barriers on equity flows to emerging markets found in the capital flow literature.