This paper offers new evidence on how currency risk is priced in the cross-section of international stock returns. Our experiment examines this long-standing question for a wide variety of test asset portfolios comprised of monthly returns for over 37,000 stocks from 46 countries over a...

This paper presents a rational expectations model of asset prices with rationally inattentive investors that, unlike previous papers, explains both the substantial amount of equity wealth invested domestically and the puzzling time series behavior of the home bias - an initial plateau before...

Recent academic research predicts that (i) equity mutual funds have a systematically better performance during periods of economic downturn and (ii) investors are willing to pay high fees for funds that provide recession insurance. In this paper, we test these hypotheses using international fund...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

The existence of country-specific risk factors that could be mitigated by international investments is investigated. An innovative methodology for quantifying the benefits of international diversification is also proposed and tested. In order to overcome many of the problems that arise in the...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models – generally identified as “home bias” – across international markets. The innovation we offer is...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models – generally identified as “home bias” – across international markets. The innovation we offer is...

Distinguishing two components of the preference for geographical proximity – the domestic country bias assessing investors' holdings within the domestic market, and the foreign country bias assessing investors' bilateral holdings within a particular host, I document a number of stylized facts...

We test the existence of a time-series relationship between the aggregate idiosyncratic volatility and the market index return at the global level by introducing various global measures of aggregate idiosyncratic volatility. We offer four definitions of aggregate global idiosyncratic volatility...

The evidence for international diversification as a means to curtail portfolio risk relies predominantly on short-run data. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the risk reduction benefits of international investment hold in the long-run. Employing a multi-horizon non-parametric filter,...