Gravity models have been widely used to describe bilateral trade in goods. Recently, Portes and Rey [1999] applied this framework to cross border equity flows and found that distance, which proxies information asymmetries in financial markets, is a surprisingly very large barrier to cross-border...

The goal of this paper is to analyze the determination of countries equity portfolios and countries stock returns behavior in the context of imperfectly integrated financial markets. We build a continuous-time equilibrium model of a two-country endowment economy in which the level of financial...

This paper analyzes the determinants of cross-border asset trade on cross-country data and a Swedish data set. We focus our analysis on the impact of the euro for the determinants of bond trade, equity and banking assets. With the help of a theoretical model, we attempt to disentangle the...

Do investors completely ignore the basics of portfolio theory? Given their over-exposure on domestic risk, investors should try to hedge this risk by picking foreign assets that have low correlation with their home assets. In the data though, we find a robust positive relationship between...

Two of the main puzzles in international economics are the consumption and the portfolio home biases. They are empirically related: countries that are more open to trade also have more internationally diversified portfolios. In a two-country stochastic equilibrium model, I prove that introducing...