Retail investors pay over twice as much attention to local companies than non-local ones, based on Google searches. News volume and volatility amplify this attention gap. Attention appears causally related to perceived proximity: first, acquisition by a nonlocal company is associated with less...

We develop a model of international portfolio choice in complete and incomplete markets with stochastic covariance between financial asset returns and exchange rates. The optimal investment strategies are derived in closed form. We estimate the model parameters and illustrate the optimal...

Policymakers fear the potentially destabilizing impact of fickle global investors on emerging markets. Euro area investors are significant participants in emerging bond markets and exhibit volatile flows, but their fickleness does not result in indiscriminate periods of surge and flight....

This paper focuses on the role of real exchange rate volatility as a driver of portfolio home bias, and in particular as an explanation for differences in home bias across financial assets. We present a Markowitz-type portfolio selection model in which real exchange rate volatility induces a...

This special feature looks at trading activity in the foreign exchange market between the Triennial Surveys conducted in 2010 and 2013 and in the months following. We estimate that the $5.3 trillion per day reported for April 2013 was a peak, with activity falling subsequently by $300 billion to...

Trading in the FX market reached an all-time high of $5.3 trillion per day in April 2013, a 35% increase relative to 2010. Non-dealer financial institutions, including smaller banks, institutional investors and hedge funds, have grown into the largest and most active counterparty segment. The...