Emerging market benefits, investability and the rule of law

We revisit the Barry, Peavy and Rodriguez (1998) paper and investigate the underlying source of emerging market performance benefits. We classify stocks according to their investability and legal origin. Emerging markets continue to represent the performance benefits they had during the Barry et al. (1998) period by providing not only return enhancement but primarily risk-reduction. More specifically, we find that an investor can achieve greater benefits by focusing on a limited set of emerging markets with a French civil law foundation and that are moderately investable stocks.