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October 31, 2003
Moskowitz Prize-Winning Study Correlates Lower Corruption With Higher Shareowner Value
by William Baue
The Social Investment Forum awards its annual Moskowitz Prize to a study that correlates lower
political corruption with higher corporate value in international markets.
SocialFunds.com --
“Does virtue pay?” asks the subtitle of the study that won this year’s Moskowitz Prize, awarded
annually by the Social Investment Forum (SIF) to outstanding quantitative research in the field of
socially responsible investing (SRI). “Yes” is the apparent answer to this question, according to
the study’s authors, David Lee and David Ng of Cornell University.
 Specifically, the study applies valuation theory
to firm-level data in 46 countries, and finds a robust correlation between political corruption and
shareowner value. Simply put, the less prevalent corruption is in a country, the higher the
shareowner value of corporations in that country, and vice versa.
"This study
demonstrates that the overall ethical climate or level of corruption in a nation has a significant
impact on corporate valuation," said Tim Smith, SIF’s president. "It also provides compelling
evidence describing how political corruption has a corrosive impact on the private sector of a
country as well as its public sector."
The study uses the definition of corruption (the
misuse of public office for private gain) endorsed by academics as well as Transparency
International (TI), one of the
leading international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) combating corruption. It also employs
TI’s annual Corruption Perception Indexes (CPIs) issued between 1995 and 1998. CPI is a “poll of
polls,” including up to 12 separate surveys of corruption.
The study finds that Denmark
was the least corrupt country during this time period, earning a score of 0.35 on a scale from 0
(least corrupt) to 9 (most corrupt), while
Pakistan was the most corrupt, with a score of
7.88. The US ranked fourteenth least corrupt with a score of 2.36.
The study cites
existing academic findings that political corruption drives up prices, reduces investment, and
reduces legal protection of shareholders. The authors extend this research to correlate corruption
with corporate value by applying valuation theory in these international markets. This analysis
demonstrates a robust correlation between political corruption and price-to-earnings (PE) and
price-to-book (PB) ratios for firms in these countries.
“The robustness of the corruption
measure as an explanatory variable for international valuation, after controlling for many other
variables, suggests to us that it might capture something beyond public sector misconduct,” state
Drs. Lee and Ng in the paper. “Although our corruption measures relate to a public sector
phenomenon, this behavior is likely to be mirrored in private sector dealings as well.”
“In fact, we believe it is more likely that the effect we document understates the true impact
of corruption on corporate values across international boundaries,” the authors conclude.
The Moskowitz Prize Committee applauds the study’s empirical advances, as it extends valuation
theory developed for US markets to international markets and links literature on political
corruption to valuation models, opening up new fields of inquiry for researchers.
The
judges granted an honorable mention to Christopher Geczy and Robert Stambaugh of the Wharton School for their paper
entitled Investing in Socially Responsible Mutual Funds.
“The Moskowitz Prize
Committee, which is composed of independent judges, provided an honorable mention to the Geczy
study because it raises some interesting theoretical issues and deals with them in a novel way,”
said Todd Larsen, SIF’s spokesperson. “It is their assessment that the study opens up some new
paths for research and deserved credit for this.”
The study’s design has been criticized,
specifically the section of the paper that finds underperformance by certain SRI portfolios
compared to non-SRI portfolios composed utilizing exceedingly sophisticated analytical techniques.
“It is the Forum's position that it would be extremely difficult to find a manager with
the skill level required to produce the returns found in the study from investing in a portfolio
drawn from the unconstrained universe,” said Mr. Larsen. “And therefore an investor in the real
world would be highly unlikely to see the difference in returns found between the unconstrained
universe and the SRI-only universe.”
“It is also important to note that portions of the
Geczy study find that SRI funds themselves are competitive, and that SRI portfolios that seek to
track the market are also competitive, providing further academic evidence for this point,” Mr.
Larsen told SocialFunds.com.
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SRI World Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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