Foreign affiliates of the world largest financial groups: Locations and governance [An article from: Research in International Business and Finance]

This digital document is a journal article from Research in International Business and Finance, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper has two objectives. The first is the documentation of the relative importance of the largest financial groups in the world. The list of top 50 financial groups ranked by total assets in 2003 is compared to a similar list available for 1986. The second objective is to examine where financial firms are expanding their operations and to document some of the factors that may explain the most-favoured locations of these financial groups. The results of this study have two important implications. First, they indicate that location-specific advantages such as size, human capital and cultural distance, do provide an explication of the internationalization of financial firms. Second, they show that good governance has a strong impact on the choice of countries by firms.