Over 70 academic papers attempt to explain why foreigners invest in US securities. All ignore the vital role of the US broker-dealer. Macroeconomic factors like a trade balance or corporate governance may guide foreign investors toward certain markets. But US broker-dealers provide information...

We exploit variation in the ancestries of U.S. equity mutual fund managers to show that ancestry affects portfolio decisions. Controlling for fund firm location, we find that funds overweight stocks from their managers’ ancestral home countries in their non-U.S. portfolio by 132 bps or 20.34%...