The price of cryptocurrency Bitcoin has risen sharply over the past ten years, with many investors adding Bitcoin to their portfolios, benefitting from price increases and diversifying their investments. But is Bitcoin suitable for this purpose? This Weekly Report examines the extent to which...

Bitcoin is a major virtual currency. Using weekly data over the 2010-2013 period, we analyze a Bitcoin investment from the standpoint of a U.S. investor with a diversified portfolio including both traditional assets (worldwide stocks, bonds, hard currencies) and alternative investments...

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities....

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models – generally identified as “home bias” – across international markets. The innovation we offer is...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models – generally identified as “home bias” – across international markets. The innovation we offer is...

Gauging foreign (domestic) biases as the deviation of foreign (domestic) investors' actual portfolio allocation of a bond market from the same bond market's weight in global bond market, we investigate the determinants of foreign and domestic investment biases in 41 global bond markets. We find...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

This paper defines financial market spillovers as the comovement between two countries' financial markets and analyzes financial market spillovers over the period 2001-12 through four channels: bilateral portfolio investment, bilateral trade, home bias, and country concentration. The paper finds...

Bitcoin is an unregulated digital currency originally introduced in 2008 without legal tender status. Based on a decentralized peer-to-peer network to confirm transactions and generate a limited amount of new bitcoins, it functions without the backing of a central bank or any other monitoring...