Download Free The Determinants Of Home Bias Puzzle In Equity Portfolio Investment In Australia Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Determinants Of Home Bias Puzzle In Equity Portfolio Investment In Australia and write the review.

Home bias - the empirical phenomenon that investors assign anomalously high weights to their own domestic assets - has puzzled academics for decades: financial theory predicts that an internationally well diversified portfolio of stocks and short-term bonds can reduce risk significantly without affecting expected return. Although the globalization of international equity markets has increased international investments, equity portfolios remain severely home biased today, and no single explanation seems to solve the puzzle completely. In this paper, we first provide a thorough description of the equity home bias phenomenon by defining, discussing, and applying the competing measures and presenting some estimates of the costs of under-diversification. Second, we evaluate the explanations for the equity home bias proposed in the literature such as information asymmetries, behavioral aspects, barriers to foreign investment, and governance issues, and conclude that each explanation on its own falls short, suggesting that the equity home bias probably reflects a combination of factors. Lastly, we review the implications of international under-diversification for portfolio formation and the cost of capital of companies.
This book helps readers understand the widely documented distortion in the portfolio choice of individual investors toward proximate firms – the proximity bias phenomenon. First, it recapitulates the fundamentals of modern portfolio theory. It then goes on to describe and demonstrate different approaches on how to measure proximity bias and identifies and examines potential motives and reasons for such a bias. In addition, the book presents new analysis on the financial effects of individual investors’ proximity bias, explaining and contributing with possible policy implications on their portfolio distortion. This book will be of interest to students and researchers, as well as decision-makers in business firms and households.
We apply a new approach to a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross-border equity flows between 14 countries, 1989-96. The model integrates elements of the finance literature on portfolio composition and the international macroeconomics and asset trade literature. Gross asset flows depend on market size in both source and destination country as well as trading costs, in which both information and the transaction technology play a role. Distance proxies some information costs, and other variables explicitly represent information transmission, an information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors, and the efficiency of transactions. The remarkably good results have strong implications for theories of asset trade. We find that the geography of information is the main determinant of the pattern of international transactions, while there is little support in our data for diversification and return-chasing motives for transactions."--Authors.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of cultural finance. It summarizes research results of cultural differences in financial decision making and financial markets. Many of the results have been published in leading academic journals over the last ten years but some are presented here for the first time. The book is based on an international survey on risk and time preferences — the INTRA study, conducted in 53 countries worldwide. Applications to financial markets include the equity premium puzzle, the value premium, dividend payout policies and asset allocations.
This book provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of research outcomes on the equity home bias puzzle – that people overinvest in domestic stocks relative to the theoretically optimal investment portfolio. It introduces place attachment – the bonding that occurs between individuals and their meaningful environments – as a new explanation for equity home bias, and presents a philosophically multi-paradigmatic view of place attachment. For the first time, a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the extant literature is provided, demonstrating that place attachment is a contributing factor to 22 different topics in which variations of home bias are present. The author also analyses the social-psychological underpinnings of place attachment, and considers the effect of multi-culturalism on the future of equity home bias. The book’s unique approach discusses the issues in conceptual terms rather than through data and statistical methods. This multi- and inter-disciplinary book is an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers interested in economics, finance, philosophy, and/or methodology, introducing them to a new line of research.
This paper presents a coordinated portfolio investment survey guide provided to assist national compilers in the conduct of the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey, conducted under the auspices of the IMF with reference to the year-end 1997. The guide covers a variety of conceptual issues that a country must address when conducting a survey. It also covers the practical issues associated with preparing for a national survey. These include setting a timetable, taking account of the legal and confidentiality issues raised, developing a mailing list, and maintaining quality control checks.
Despite the liberalization of foreign portfolio investment around the globe since the early 1980s, the home-bias phenomenon is still found to exist. Using a relatively new IMF survey dataset of cross-border equity holdings, this paper tests new structural equations from a consumption-based asset-pricing model on international portfolio holdings. Using of stock data allows us to provide new and clear-cut evidence on the determinants of international portfolio holdings. The empirical results show that an augmented gravity model performs remarkably well. The results indicate that market size, transaction cost, and information asymmetry are major determinants of cross-border portfolio choice. These findings shed light on alternative theories of international portfolio holdings, especially on the transaction and information cost-based explanations of home bias.
Recent changes in technology, along with the opening up of many regions previously closed to investment, have led to explosive growth in the international movement of capital. Flows from foreign direct investment and debt and equity financing can bring countries substantial gains by augmenting local savings and by improving technology and incentives. Investing companies acquire market access, lower cost inputs, and opportunities for profitable introductions of production methods in the countries where they invest. But, as was underscored recently by the economic and financial crises in several Asian countries, capital flows can also bring risks. Although there is no simple explanation of the currency crisis in Asia, it is clear that fixed exchange rates and chronic deficits increased the likelihood of a breakdown. Similarly, during the 1970s, the United States and other industrial countries loaned OPEC surpluses to borrowers in Latin America. But when the U.S. Federal Reserve raised interest rates to control soaring inflation, the result was a widespread debt moratorium in Latin America as many countries throughout the region struggled to pay the high interest on their foreign loans. International Capital Flows contains recent work by eminent scholars and practitioners on the experience of capital flows to Latin America, Asia, and eastern Europe. These papers discuss the role of banks, equity markets, and foreign direct investment in international capital flows, and the risks that investors and others face with these transactions. By focusing on capital flows' productivity and determinants, and the policy issues they raise, this collection is a valuable resource for economists, policymakers, and financial market participants.
It is an established fact that investors favor the familiar%u2014be it domestic securities or, within a country, the securities of nearby firms%u2014and avoid investments that would provide the greatest diversification benefits. While we do not rule out familiarity as an important driver of portfolio allocations, we provide new evidence of investors%u2019 international diversification motive. In particular, our analysis of the security-level U.S. equity holdings of foreign and domestic institutional investors indicates that institutional investors reveal a preference for domestic multinationals (MNCs), even after controlling for familiarity factors. We attribute this revealed preference to the desire to obtain %u201Csafe%u201D international diversification. We then show that holdings of domestic MNCs are substantial and, after accounting for this home-grown foreign exposure, that the share of %u201Cforeign%u201D equities in investors%u2019 portfolios roughly doubles, reducing (but not eliminating) the observed home bias.
Is the euro area getting closer with regard to business cycles? The study investigates the linkage between business cycle convergence and financial portfolio choice for a panel of 18 European countries. For this purpose an index is constructed which measures the similarity of investment portfolios. The idea is that financial portfolio choice has an impact on business cycles and contributes to convergence via the consumption-wealth linkage. The background of the analysis is the International Asset Pricing Model (IAPM). The results of fixed effects GMM TSLS estimations confirm the linkage. The effect is higher for country-pairs that are built by one euro area member and one member outside the euro area.