Going Global or Staying Local: Determinants of Domestic and International Corporate Bond Issues in the Baltics

In the period 2017-2022, there has been a notable growth in international bond placements by Baltic companies, which is distinct from corporate bond issuance in the European Economic Area. While the Baltic governments have demonstrated an increased focus on the corporate bond market development – the pan-Baltic Capital Markets Union launched in 2017 and covered bond law as adopted in Latvia in 2021, those activities are not directly linked to the ongoing shift to international corporate borrowing. In the academic literature, the determinants affecting corporate bond issuance are getting certain attention while studying separately the country-level determinants and the firm-level determinants, which are further split into domestic and international corporate bond issuance. For the Baltic countries, rare academic research has focused on the corporate bond market development of an individual Baltic country. This paper aims to discover the determinants for domestic and international corporate bond issuance of Baltic companies. While providing theoretical insight into corporate bond issuance rationale for both domestic and international placements, the paper focuses on factors that have contributed to firms choosing to issue bonds internationally. The methods applied in this study are scientific publication analysis, document analysis, expert survey, in-depth interviews, and statistical data analysis. For the statistical analysis, macroeconomic data was acquired from Cbonds, The World Bank, and International Monetary Fund databases in combination with company-specific data gathered from Nasdaq CSD, Orbis, Lursoft, Storybook, and Rekvizitai. The authors have employed a panel regression model for domestic and international bond issuance, and probit regression for all issued bonds in the Baltics from 2003-2022 to estimate the probability of pursuing bond financing internationally. The findings of this paper indicate that in the Baltics the main firm-level determinants for domestic corporate bond issuance are the company’s financial performance, its geographic exposure, documentation and listing costs, and access to alternative funding sources; on the country-level, the determinants are the share of sovereign international bonds of GDP, corruption perception, and exports as a share of GDP. For issuing international corporate bonds, the main determinants on the firm-level are bond placement size, company size, equity ratio, a satisfactory credit rating, and appropriate yields in the context of higher competition for international investor attention; on the country-level, GDP per capita, country’s export share, interest rate spread, regulatory quality, and political stability play an important role.