Cracking the Emerging Markets Enigma
Financial Management Association Survey and Synthesis Series

Investing in emerging markets requires a careful analysis of potential risks and benefits that vary greatly from country to country. Informed investors and firms must devise their own system of assessing risk when considering investments in these regions-systems that often omit influential factors and fail to respond flexibly to swiftly changing conditions, be they political, economic, or otherwise. Cracking the Emerging Markets Enigma outlines a rigorous, comprehensive, and practical framework for evaluating the opportunities and, more importantly, the risks of investing in emerging markets. Built on a foundation of sound research on foreign direct and portfolio capital flows, Andrew Karolyi's proposed system of evaluation incorporates multiple dimensions of the potential risks faced by prospective investors in an empirically coherent framework. These dimensions of risk reflect the uneven quality or fragility of the various institutions designed to assure integrity in capital markets. By distilling these analyses into a numerical scoring system, Karolyi has devised a way to assess emerging markets by different dimensions of risk and across all dimensions together. This novel assessment framework has been tested in the private sector to great success. Researchers, students, firms, and both seasoned and novice investors are poised to gain a clear understanding of how to evaluate potential investments in emerging markets to maximize profit.

G. Andrew Karolyi is Alumni Professor of Asset Management, Professor of Finance, and Co-Director of the Emerging Markets Institute in the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.