Date of Defense

4-27-2012

Date of Graduation

4-28-2012

Department

Finance and Commercial Law

First Advisor

David A. Burnie

Second Advisor

Judith Swisher

Third Advisor

Jim DeMello

Keywords

Whistleblowing, developed markets, emerging markets

Abstract

This paper intends to study the impact of whistleblowing legislations and on developed and emerging markets. The main reason the study is carried out is because there is lack of research and literature conducted on this topic areas. The testing of the relationship between how whistleblowing affects the equity markets in developed and emerging countries is conducted through a multi-regression analysis across four parameters (i) the weekly historical adjusted returns of the countries' indices around the time the legislation was proposed or passed, (ii) the occurrence of the event which is the week when the legislation was promulgated or enacted, (iii) the whistleblowing scores of each country taken from Global Integrity Report, and (iv) the types of market the country is classified as - emerging market or developed market (classification from?).

The findings from this research indicated that there is no significant correlation between the occurrence of the legislation's enactment and the adjusted returns. However, there were some interesting findings from the results of the multi-regression analysis. The first is there is a significant inverse relationship between adjusted returns and the whistleblowing score, in which countries with higher whistleblowing scores had lower adjusted returns. The second finding is that there is positive relationship between the adjusted returns and the types of market, whereby emerging markets have stronger correlation to positive adjusted returns in comparison to the returns for developed markets.

There are, however, some drawbacks to this study. The first is that the results could be biased due to sampling errors in which the samples especially from the emerging markets. Also, the samples could not be randomly selected as there were insufficient data to fulfil the required parameters. This consequently led to limitations due to small sample size such as increased variability in data results. The second drawback is that the Global Integrity Report scores on whistleblowing measures do not measure the effectiveness of the legislation per se as it includes scores on other whistleblowing enforcements.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Open Access

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