Pension reform, institutional investors’ growth and stock market development in the developing countries: does it function?

In this paper, we evaluate an empirical link between recent institutional assets’ growth, institutional behaviour and stock market performance in the developing countries. Using the GMM technique on the panel of eight Central and Eastern European (CEE) developing countries over the period of 1995-2006, our results indicate that institutional development exerts a robust and significant impact on the securities markets’ growth in the developing countries. In particular, we find that institutional investors contribute to the greater activity of the emerging capital markets and this effect is a result of higher demand for the local securities induced by these institutions. In addition, in countries where the institutional investors actively participate in the corporate governance, their presence possibly reduces the cost of capital for firms and also positively influences the stock market capitalization. Our findings suggest that the pension reform has contributed significantly to the institutional development and stock market growth in the CEE countries.