This paper looks at the determinants of country and industry specific factors in international portfolio returns using a sample of thirty-six countries and thirty-nine industries over the last three decades. Country factors have remained relatively stable over the sample period, while industry...

The increase in international economic integration in the past decades, fueled by the amplified trade and financial flows around the world changed the size and scope of benefits that international investors may obtain from holding diversified portfolios. Our paper investigates the impact of...

We estimate the long-run relationships among NAFTA capital market returns and then calculate the weights of a “time-varying minimum variance portfolio†that includes the Canadian, Mexican, and USA capital markets between March 2007 and March 2009, a period of intense turbulence in...

We test the proposition that international diversification is effective in reducing risk. The traditional underlying argument is that low correlations of international stock returns make the variance of an international portfolio lower than the variance of a purely domestic portfolio when long...

This paper demonstrates that, after integration, equity portfolios of countries that joined the European Monetary Union have converged at faster rate than those of NON EMU countries. This outcome can be interpreted as a combination of the convergence of inflation rates and the convergence of...

This paper demonstrates that, after integration, equity portfolios of countries that joined the European Monetary Union have converged at faster rate than those of NON EMU countries. This outcome can be interpreted as a combination of the convergence of inflation rates and the convergence of...

We investigate the role of information asymmetries and inflation hedging in shaping international equity portfolios. We confirm, in a multinational setting, Cooper and Kaplanis (1994) result of no inflation hedging motive driving investors' behavior and find evidence of a crucial role for...

The shift of perspective from a national basis to a Euro area basis, inevitably induced by EMU, has led member countries to a parallel shift from equity home bias to equity Euro bias. We interpret this evidence by means of a standard mean-variance portfolio selection model modified in order to...

This paper demonstrates that, after integration, equity portfolios of countries that joined the European Monetary Union have converged at faster rate than those of NON EMU countries. This outcome can be interpreted as a combination of the convergence of inflation rates and the convergence of...

The bilateral foreign portfolio equities among Euro area members have shrunk by 40 percent after 2007. While both the financial crisis and the enlargement are potentially responsible of this abrupt and persistent contraction in financial integration, our work detects a major role for the crisis....