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...

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...

This study affirms the negative relationship between corruption and real estate investment flows using a comprehensive set of cross-border commercial real estate investment data from 2001 to 2014. We find non-information explanations for foreign investments in corrupt countries. Foreign...

We establish that global portfolios are driven by an often neglected aspect: the currency of denomination of assets. Using a dataset of $27 trillion in security-level investment positions, we demonstrate that investor holdings are biased toward their own currencies to such an extent that each...

Theories of home bias and of portfolio choice under uncertainty both predict that the home bias should increase during a financial crisis. In contrast to these theories, using a sample of 45 countries, I document that the equity home bias fell during the financial panic of 2008. Disentangling...

Analyzing several Developed and Emerging international markets, I test the ability of global, regional, and local models to explain a large set of 134 cross-sectional anomalies. My main finding is that both global and regional factor models create substantially larger average absolute alphas...

U.S. mutual funds invest significantly more in countries that have a strong associated ethnic group population near the funds' offices. Moreover, the ethnicity of the mutual fund's manager is strongly predictive of the mutual fund's international holdings. Mutual funds that take advantage of the...

We develop an international financial market model in which domestic and foreign residents differ in their beliefs about the information content in public signals. We determine how informational advantages by domestic investors in the interpretation of home public signals impact equity markets....

The observed international home bias has traditionally been viewed as an anomaly. This paper provides statistical evidence contrary to this view within a mean-variance framework. Two methods of estimating the expected return and covariance parameters are investigated: (i) the traditional...