This paper presents a rational expectations model of asset prices with rationally inattentive investors that, unlike previous papers, explains both the substantial amount of equity wealth invested domestically and the puzzling time series behavior of the home bias - an initial plateau before...

This paper implements a parsimonious and practical methodology to examine the diversification potential of international equity portfolios. The analysis shows that the Portfolio Diversification Index (Rudin, A.M., and Morgan, J.S., Journal of Portfolio Management [2006]) efficiently replicates a...

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...

The paper develops measures of home bias for 46 countries over the period 2001 to 2011 by employing various models: International Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM), Mean-Variance, Minimum-Variance, Bayes-Stein, Bayesian and Multi-Prior. ICAPM country portfolio weights are computed relative to...

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...

Households with familiarity biases tilt their portfolios toward a few risky assets. The resulting mean-variance loss from portfolio underdiversification is equivalent to only a modest reduction of about 1 percent per year in a household's portfolio return. However, once we consider also the...

Downside volatility and volatility typically comove but are not highly correlated during the most volatile times. We show that portfolios scaled by downside volatility expand the ex post mean-variance frontiers constructed using the original portfolios and volatility-managed portfolios of...

We review the international finance literature to assess the extent to which international factors affect financial asset demands and prices. International asset-pricing models with mean-variance investors predict that an asset's risk premium depends on its covariance with the world market...

Loss aversion has been used to explain why a high equity premium might be consistent with plausible levels of risk aversion. The intuition is that the first-order-different utility impact of wealth gains and losses leads loss-averse investors to behave similarly to investors with high risk...