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...

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...