We analyze a unique data set and uncover a remarkable result that casts a new light on the home bias phenomenon. The data are comprehensive, security-level holdings of emerging market equities by U.S. investors. We document that at a point in time U.S. portfolios are tilted towards firms that are large, have fewer restrictions on foreign ownership, or are cross-listed on a U.S. exchange. The size of the cross-listing effect is striking. In contrast to the well-documented under-weighting of foreign stocks, emerging market equities that are cross-listed on a U.S. exchange are incorporated into U.S. portfolios at full international CAPM weights. Our results suggest that information asymmetries play an important role in equity home bias and that the benefits of international risk sharing are limited to select firms.

I investigate the determinants of business cycle synchronization across regions. The linkages between trade in goods, financial openness, specialization, and business cycle synchronization are evaluated in the context of a system of simultaneous equations. The main results are as follows. (i) Specialization patterns have a sizable effect on business cycles. Most of this effect is independent of trade or financial policy, but directly reflects differences in GDP per capita. (ii) A variety of measures of financial integration suggest that economic regions with strong financial links are significantly more synchronized, even though they also tend to be more specialized. (iii) The estimated role of trade is closer to that implied by existing models once intra-industry trade is held constant. The results obtain in a variety of data sets, measurement strategies, and specifications. They relate to a recent strand of international business cycle models with incomplete markets and transport costs and, on the empirical side, point to an important omission in the list of criteria defining an optimal currency area, namely, specialization patterns.

We investigate the conditions under which an intertemporal equilibrium model based on investors' portfolio decisions can explain the dynamics of high-frequency equity flows. Our model shows that, when there are barriers to international investment and when the expectations of foreign investors are more extrapolative than those of domestic investors (either due to foreigners being less informed or for behavioral reasons), unexpectedly high worldwide or local stock returns lead to net equity inflows in small countries. We investigate these predictions using daily data on net equity flows for nine emerging-market countries. Equity flows are positively related to host-country stock returns as well as market performance abroad at daily frequencies. Though these effects are remarkably robust at the daily frequency, they dissipate quickly.

This paper finds that the growth and expansion of U.S. cross-listings by firms from emerging markets around the world facilitated an expansion of cross-border equity flows and overall development of their stock markets during the 1990s. However, these benefits have negative spillover effects; the capitalization and turnover ratios of local-market firms that do not pursue overseas listings decline as U.S. cross-listings in the form of American depositary receipts (ADRs) increase in size and scope. We investigate various possible sources of these negative spillovers and offer new evidence that the growth of ADRs neither facilitates nor hinders local-market development, but represent an outcome of poorly functioning local markets. Policy implications are discussed.

This paper tests if real and financial linkages between countries can explain why movements in the world's largest markets often have such large effects on other financial markets, and how these cross-market linkages have changed over time. It estimates a factor model in which a country's market returns are determined by global, sectoral, and cross-country factors (returns in large financial markets) and by country-specific effects. Then it uses a new data set on bilateral linkages between the world's five largest economies and approximately 40 other markets to decompose the cross-country factor loadings into direct trade flows, competition in third markets, bank lending, and foreign direct investment. In the latter half of the 1990s, bilateral trade flows are large and significant determinants of how shocks are transmitted from large economies to other stock and bond markets. Bilateral foreign investment is usually insignificant. Therefore, despite the recent growth in global financial flows, direct trade still appears to be the most important determinant of how movements in the world's largest markets affect financial markets around the globe.

This paper compares the comovement of individual stock returns across emerging markets. Campbell et al. and Morck et al. have shown that the United States saw rising firm-specific stock return variations, and thus declining comovement, over the second half of the twentieth century. We detect a similar, albeit weaker, pattern in most, but not all, emerging markets. We further find that higher firm-specific variation is associated with greater capital market openness, but not goods market openness. Moreover, this relationship is magnified by institutional integrity (good government). Goods market openness is associated with higher marketwide variation.