Understanding emerging market equity risk premia: Industries, governance and macroeconomic policy uncertainty

The average equity risk premium (ERP) in emerging markets is well-known to be significantly higher than in developed markets. But, key reasons for this remain unclear, contributing to investment strategy uncertainty. Here, we use industry-level data for 19 emerging market countries across three regions of the world to first examine the contribution of each industrial stock market to the extra premium paid by emerging markets to international investors from 1995 to present, and then to explore the relative importance of country-level governance and macroeconomic policy uncertainty in explaining both national and regional industry-by-industry ERP behavior. We conduct separate analyses for the emerging market crises period of 1995–2002, and the post-crises period of 2003–2012. Based on both static and dynamic approaches, we find that some industries indeed perform consistently better than others. In particular: (i) the healthcare and basic materials industries mostly contributed to the extra premium paid by the Asian stock market; and (ii) the East European and Latin American stock markets’ extra performances were largely driven by the utilities and consumer services industries, respectively. However, our cross-sectional analyses suggest that country-level governance indicators are not strongly correlated with either national or industry-level returns, with the exception of the consumer goods industry. Lastly, using both rolling-window and DCC-GARCH frameworks, we find that correlations between industrial stock market excess returns and a measure of global economic policy uncertainty are consistently negative, and follow similar patterns. Our empirical evidence as a whole suggests that industrial stock markets are more highly related both within and across countries and regions than has been suggested previously. Contrary to much existing empirical work, our results therefore suggest there is currently little space in emerging markets to exploit cross-industry portfolio diversification benefits.