Equity home bias is one of the most enduring puzzles in international finance. In this paper, I start out by documenting a novel stylized fact about home bias: countries with weaker domestic institutions hold fewer foreign assets. I then explore a macroeconomic mechanism by which the presence of...

U.S. equity outperformance and sustained dollar appreciation have led to large valuation gains for the rest of the world on the U.S. external position. I construct their global distribution, carefully accounting for the role of tax havens. Valuation gains are concentrated and large in developed...

The G7 countries traditionally display home bias in assets (equities and bonds), but over the last 25 years this bias has progressively decreased, especially for equity portfolios. At the same time, the indebtedness of non-financial corporations has tended to increase and comove across...

This paper provides global evidence supporting the hypothesis that expected return models are enhanced by the inclusion of variables that describe the evolution of book-to-market—changes in book value, changes in price, and net share issues. This conclusion is supported using data representing...

This paper studies whether bilateral international financial connection data help predict bilateral stock return comovement. It is shown that, when the United States is chosen as the benchmark, a larger U.S. portfolio investment asset position on the destination economy predicts a stronger stock...

This paper investigates the relevance of skewed Student-t distributions in capturing long memory volatility properties in the daily return series of Japanese financial data (Nikkei 225 Index and JPY-USD exchange rate). For this purpose, we assess the performance of two long memory Value-at-Risk...

The purpose of this paper is to set out a surprisingly simple solution to the Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle or Paradox, which is that even though global financial markets appear to be integrated, levels of saving and investment are correlated across countries because financial markets cannot, by...

This paper empirically tests information asymmetries and learning in global commercial real estate markets. We find that foreign investors pay a premium of 3.6%, on average, relative to local investors for comparable properties in local markets. The premiums reflect information disadvantages of...

This paper investigates the major drivers of the public debt growth in 184 countries. The underlying cross-country survey is conducted on the basis of the improved compilation of datasets on the central government debt for 2013. The study finds that oil abundance, economic growth rate, the share...

This study relates financial integration to credit risk of banks in a panel of countries. Over the period of study, we compute measures of financial integration for a panel of banks and examine how they relate to the credit risk of borrowing banks. The result of an instrumental variable approach...