What Causes Financial Crisis in Asian Countries?

Abstract:In this paper, we investigate the indicators of financial crisis in Asian countries, focusing more on the impact of corporate governance. Unlike the previous studies such as Johnson et al. (2000) and Acemoglu et al. (2003) that use some fixed measures of corporate governance based on the law in force in a specific year—such as the anti-director right index (ADRI) or the anti-self dealing index (ASDI)—we employ the annual Worldwide Governance Index (WGIs) and the Quality of Governance Index. The regression results, which use the data of 19 Asian countries from 1996 to 2015, and control for country fixed effect and the business cycle, show that the macroeconomic factors appear to have no effect, or a minor effect, on currency depreciation. However, better corporate governance reduces the decline in currency value.