In the debate whether country factors are typically more variable than sector factors, sparked off by e.g. Roll (1991) and Heston and Rouwenhorst (1994), one of the few uncontested facts is that the addition of emerging markets (EMs) does boost the ratio of country-factor variance relative to...

Since Roll (The Journal of Finance 47(1):3-41, 1992) and Heston and Rouwenhorst (Journal of Financial Economics 36:3-27, 1994), there has been a debate whether country factors in international stock returns are typically more variable than sector factors. The addition of emerging markets (EMs)...