How important is foreign diversification? In this paper, we re-examine this question motivated by findings from the literature about foreign companies that are listed on US exchanges. Specifically, domestic portfolios including cross-listed stocks can provide the same diversification as foreign...

Over the past two decades international markets have become more open, leading to a common perception that global capital markets have become more integrated. In this paper, I ask what this integration and its resulting higher correlation would imply about the diversification potential across...

This paper presents a survey of two basic puzzles in international finance. The first puzzle is the `predictable excess return puzzle.' The returns on foreign currency deposits relative to domestic currency deposits should be equalized based upon uncovered interest parity. However, not only do...

Recent research in international business cycles based upon complete markets has found that international consumption correlations are lower than predicted by the standard risk-sharing implications of these models. In this paper, I use regression tests to ask whether two different types of...

Empirical studies of the restrictions implied by the intertemporal capital asset pricing model across different asset markets have found conflicting evidence. In general, restrictions from this model have been rejected over short holding periods, but not over longer holding periods such as a...

Recent studies have shown that disaster risk can generate asset return moments similar to those observed in the U.S. data. However, these studies have ignored the cross-country asset pricing implications of the disaster risk model. This paper shows that standard U.S.-based disaster risk model...

The reaction of foreign stocks to cross-listing events has been documented in an extensive literature, finding that the betas of these stocks change over time. In this paper, I use stock return data for foreign companies listed on U.S. exchanges to ask whether the betas changed at all and, if...

Most studies of the expectations theory of the term structure reject the model. However, the significance of the rejections depend strongly upon the form of the test. In this paper, we use the pattern of rejection across maturities to back out the implied behavior of time-varying risk premia...

Under conventional notions about rational expectations and market efficiency, expected returns differ from the actual expost returns by a forecast error that is uncorrelated with current information. In this paper, we describe how small departures from conventional notions of rational...

Domestic investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest. This phenomenon has been called equity home bias.' In the absence of this home bias, investors would optimally diversify away domestic output...