To obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction stemming from the lower correlation exisiting between assets of different countries. The question that we raise in this...

This paper addresses whether country allocation provides benefits over industry allocation in a sample of European country and industry indexes. Strategy performance is compared using a mean-variance spanning test. We find that, for investors with low risk aversion, industry allocation is as...

We use constrained cross-section regressions to disentangle the effects of various factors on international real estate security returns. Besides a common factor, pure country, property type, size, and value/growth factors are considered. The value/growth measure that is used in this paper...

This paper uses a simple model of mean-variance asset pricing with transaction costs to analyze one of the main empirical phenomena in stock market competition in the last years, the decrease of transaction costs. We endogenize transaction costs as variables strategically influenced by stock...

This paper studies the impact of EMU on portfolio diversification opportunities. We find a significant increase in the correlation between stock returns, whether they are computed on the basis of market or sector indices. This is true for two definitions of the pre-convergence and convergence...

Diversification opportunities in Euroland appear to have improved significantly since the advent of the euro, thus invalidating the prospects identified in the last years of the convergence-to-EMU period. We identify low frequency movements in the time series of return dispersions suggestive of...

This research addresses whether geographic diversification provides benefits over industry diversification in a sample of European country and industry indexes. The methodology allows performance comparisons with short-selling constraints, upper and lower bounds, and many benchmarks. In the...

We investigate the influence of various fundamental variables on a cross-section of credit default swap transaction data. Credit default swap rates can be seen as a superior proxy to credit risk than bond spreads are. Because we have transaction prices rather than quotes, we have thus...

Morck, Yeung and Yu (MYY, 2000) show that R2 and other measures of stock market synchronicity are higher in countries with less developed financial systems and poorer corporate governance. MYY and Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel and Xu (2001) also find a secular decline in R2 in the United States over...

This paper reassesses, at the light of economic and financial theory, the well-documented recent evolution of the euro area public debt and equity markets. Doing so leads to associating the EMU and the single market with the changes in fundamentals and financial integration with convergence in...