Portfolio rebalancing is a key driver of the Uncovered Equity Parity (UEP) condition. According to UEP, when foreign equity holdings outperform domestic holdings, domestic investors are exposed to higher exchange rate exposure and hence repatriate some of the foreign equity to decrease their...

Estimates of U.S. returns differentials have ranged from exorbitant to quite small, in part because of their volatility coupled with the relatively short time series available. We shed light on underlying drivers of returns differentials by presenting a number of decompositions: a by-asset-class...

Foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasuries increased from $400 billion in January 1994 to about $3 trillion in June 2010. Most of this growth is accounted for by a handful of emerging market economies that have been running large current account surpluses. These countries are channeling their...

We investigate the impact of two types of financial liberalizations on short- and long-horizon capital flows to emerging markets in a framework that controls for push and pull factors. The first type of liberalization, a reduction in capital controls, is countrywide but uncertain, because its...

A debate has raged in the general equilibrium literature on the impact of trade costs on portfolio home bias. In all of these models there is a simple, easily observed covariance-variance ratio. We compute this term using data on real exchange rates and asset returns. The resulting portfolio...