Do Implicit Barriers Matter for Globalization?

Market liberalization may not result in global pricing or full market integration if implicit barriers are important. We use the conditional version of the Errunza and Losq (1985) model to estimate pricing of investable indices for 22 emerging markets and test this proposition. Our results show that local factors are priced and the implicit barriers are significantly associated with the integration measure. Specifically, better institutions, stronger corporate governance and more transparent markets would jointly contribute to a higher degree of integration by about 30 percent