Financial disclosure and international capital mobility in Latin America

Abstract

The extant literature provides evidence on the impact of financial disclosure environments on international capital mobility. However, to our knowledge, there are no such studies including Latin-American countries. We aimed to fill this void by assessing the influence of accounting information on international capital mobility in a twenty-two-country sample, including the three largest Latin-American countries: Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The countries included in the sample represent around 80% of the world's GDP from 1995 to 2001. Our empirical results show with a 99% confidence level that the degree of disclosure of value-relevant accounting information has positively influenced international capital mobility. We also show, with a 95% confidence level, that countries where financial accounting is less aligned with tax accounting present higher international capital mobility. The three Latin-American countries studied present relatively low levels of disclosure among the sampled countries. However, whereas Argentina and Brazil show low levels of capital mobility, Mexico stands out with a high capital mobility, which we reckon could be accounted for by the country's trade and investment connections with the US and by its participation in the NAFTA.