Recent models on international equity portfolios exhibit two potential caveats: 1) Portfolios are indeterminate in the presence of bonds denominated in different currencies; 2) Equity portfolios are highly sensitive to preference parameters. We show that the addition of an additional, even...

Gravity equations have been a very useful and powerful tool to model international trade in goods and asset portfolios. However, the negative impact of distance (justified by trans-portation costs for trade in goods and by transaction costs for trade in assets) is surprisingly high. This paper...

Despite the liberalization of capital flows among OECD countries, equity home bias remains sizable. We depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias: transaction costs that impede international diversification, and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk...

Despite the liberalization of international capital flows during the last decades, typical investors continue to hold most of their wealth in domestic assets. International RBC models can explain that 'portfolio home bias', if consumption home bias is incorporated, i.e. the fact that the bulk of...

Home bias is a perennial feature of international capital markets. We review various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon highlighting recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that incorporate international portfolio choices in standard two-country general equilibrium models. We refer...

We ask how much the advent of the `one child policy' can explain the sharp rise in China's household saving rate. In a life-cycle model with endogenous fertility, intergenerational transfers and human capital accumulation, we show a macroeconomic and a microeconomic channel through which...

We propose a simple quantitative method to linearize around the risky steady state of a small open economy. Unlike when the deterministic steady state is used, the net foreign asset position is well defined. We allow for both stochastic income and stochastic interest rate.

Two of the main puzzles in international economics are the consumption and the portfolio home biases. We solve for international equity portfolios in a two-country/two-good stochastic equilibrium model with trade costs in goods markets. We show that introducing trade costs, as suggested by...

Despite the liberalization of capital flows among OECD countries, equity home bias remains sizable. We depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias: transaction costs that impede international diversification, and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk...