Home bias is a perennial feature of international capital markets. We review various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon highlighting recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that incorporate international portfolio choices in standard two-country general equilibrium models. We refer...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to flexibly infer border barriers are often missing for services, we derive a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical...

This paper describes regularities in the intraday spreads and prices quoted by dealers on the London Stock Exchange. It develops a measure of spread-related transaction costs, one that recognizes dealers' willingness to price trades within their quoted spreads. This measure of transaction costs...

Improved information technology and higher volume should drive orders to be concentrated in one market, lowering the costs of transactions. However, the opposite occurred during the bull market of the 1920s when rapid technological change spawned a flood of new issues. This paper employs newly...

Households hold nondiversified stock portfolios of firms headquartered near their city of residence. Explanations assign a causal role for proximity, either in generating an informational advantage or a familiarity bias. Empirical analyses assume households locate randomly, even though they...

We develop a new identification strategy to evaluate the impact of the geographic expansion of bank holding company (BHC) assets across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on BHC risk. We find that the geographic expansion of bank assets reduces risk. Moreover, geographic expansion...

We establish currency as an important factor shaping global portfolios. Using a new security-level dataset, we demonstrate that investor holdings are biased toward their own currencies to such an extent that countries typically hold most of the foreign debt securities denominated in their...

This paper conducts a theoretical and empirical investigation of global portfolio diversification for long-horizon investors in the presence of permanent cash flow shocks and transitory discount rate shocks to asset prices and returns. An increase in the cross-country correlations of cash flow...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification—NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)—equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases...