We use the European Central Bank's new and detailed database of European equity holdings by households to test two competing theories of international biases in equity portfolios, viz. that they reflect either informational advantages or familiarity bias. The database allows lookthrough handling...

The literature on international equity holdings distinguishes between home bias (overweighting of home stocks) and foreign bias (relative underweighting for more 'distant' countries). The two biases can be integrated into one distance-based model. We define pure home bias as the excess of home...

Despite of the intuitive idea that corporate governance and transparency are crucial for a country's international appeal, foreign portfolio investors appear to care first and foremost about transparency, predictability and honesty in governments. This is, at least, what our analysis of...

We generalize the Cooper and Kaplanis (1994) methodology for estimating the costs that could reconcile international portfolio holdings with CAPM predictions. First, we can simultaneously estimate inward and outward investment costs and even interactions between home and host country. Second,...

This paper reviews the recent literature on equity home bias - the empirical finding that people over invest in domestic stocks relative to the theoretically optimal investment portfolio. We cover different home bias measures and we illustrate the extent and the evolution of equity home bias...

This paper investigates the importance of having a sovereign credit rating for a country's financial development. After controlling for endogeneity and selection bias, we compare different aspects of the financial sector and the capital markets of recently rated countries with otherwise similar,...

This paper shows that the characteristics of convertible bond funds (CBFs) differ considerably based on the regional asset allocation of the fund. More specifically, U.S. CBF returns correlate more strongly with equity returns, while European and Asian CBFs returns show a higher correlation with...

Vast empirical evidence underscores that exporting firms are more productive than non-exporters. As governments accordingly pursue export-promoting policies we are interested in the firmness of these conclusions with respect to African small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and the influence...

We show how to estimate a Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient in Stata after running a principal component or factor analysis. Alpha evaluates to what extent items measure the same underlying content when the items are combined into a scale or used for latent variable. Stata allows for...