Domestic investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest, a phenomenon called "equity home bias. " In the absence of this bias, investors would optimally diversify domestic output risk using foreign equities. Therefore, consumption growth rates would tend to comove across countries even when output growth rates do not. Empirically, however, consumption growth rates tend to have a lower correlation across countries than do output growth rates, a phenomenon I call "consumption home bias. " In this paper, I discuss these two biases and their potential relationship. I appreciate useful suggestions and comments from three anonymous referees and John Pencavel, the editor. I am also grateful to Michael Adler, Urban Jermann, and Amir Yaron for helpful discussions. Any errors or omissions are my responsibility alone. 1 Do individuals hold the optimal portfolio? Do they do a good job of hedging risks? The answer to these questions are clearly important for understanding the economy. If individuals indeed hedge risk optimally, then resources are allocated to their most efficient uses. If not, then many other questions arise. Why not? What is the explanation for these inefficiencies? And what

forthcoming Journal of Finance Non-U.S. firms cross-listing shares on U.S. exchanges as American Depositary Receipts earn cumulative abnormal returns of 19 percent during the year before listing, an additional 1.20 percent during the listing week, but incur a loss of 14 percent during the year following listing. We show how these unusual share price changes are robust to changing market risk exposures and are related to an expansion of the shareholder base and to the amount of capital raised at the time of listing. Our tests provide support for the

Value stocks have higher returns than growth stocks in markets around the world. For the period 1975 through 1995, the difference between the average returns on global portfolios of high and low book-to-market stocks is 7.68 percent per year, and value stocks outperform growth stocks in twelve of thirteen major markets. An international capital asset pricing model cannot explain the value premium, but a two-factor model that includes a risk factor for relative distress captures the value premium in international returns. INVESTMENT MANAGERS CLASSIFY FIRMS that have high ratios of book-to-market equity ~B0M!, earnings to price ~E0P!, or cash flow to price ~C0P! as value stocks. Fama and French ~1992, 1996! and Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny ~1994! show that for U.S. stocks there is a strong value premium in average returns. High B0M, E0P, or C0P stocks have higher average returns than low B0M, E0P, or C0P stocks. Fama and French ~1995! and Lakonishok et al. ~1994! also show that the value premium is associated with relative distress.

especially grateful for the thoughtful and thorough comments of the referee which greatly improved the paper. Geert Bekaert thanks the NSF for financial support.

The purpose of this monograph is to survey the academic literature on the economic implications of the corporate decision to list shares on an overseas stock exchange. My focus is on the valuation and liquidity effects of the listing decision, and the impact of listing on the company’s global risk exposure and its cost of equity capital. The evidence shows: (1) share prices reacts favorably to cross-border listings in the first month after listing; (2) post-listing price performance up to one year is highly variable across companies depending on the home and listing market, its capitalization, capital-raising needs and other company-specific factors; (3) post-listing trading volume increases on average, and, for many issues, home-market trading volume increases also; (4) liquidity of trading in shares improves overall, but depends on the increase in total trading volume, the listing location and the scope of foreign ownership restrictions in the home market; (5) domestic market risk is significantly reduced and is associated with only a small increase in global market risk and foreign exchange risk, which can result in a net reduction in the cost of equity capital of about 126 basis points; (6) American Depositary Receipts represent an effective vehicle to diversify U.S.-based investment programs globally; (7) stringent disclosure requirements are the most important impediment to cross-border listings. I.

We estimate and test the conditional version of an International Capital Asset Pricing Model using a parsimonious multivariate GARCH process. Since our approach is fully parametric, we can recover any quantity that is a function of the first two conditional moments. Our findings strongly support a model which includes both market and foreign exchange risk. However, both sources of risk are only detected when their prices are allowed to change over time. The evidence also indicates that, with the exception of the U.S. equity market, the premium for bearing currency risk often represents a significant

This paper investigates nonlinear pricing kernels in which the risk factor is endogenously determined and preferences restrict the definition of the pricing kernel. These kernels potentially generate the empirical performance of nonlinear and multifactor models, while maintaining empirical power and avoiding ad hoc specifications of factors or functional form. Our test results indicate that preferencerestricted nonlinear pricing kernels are both admissible for the cross section of returns and are able to significantly improve upon linear single- and multifactor kernels. Further, the nonlinearities in the pricing kernel drive out the importance of the factors in the linear multi-factor model. A PRINCIPAL IMPLICATION OF THE Capital Asset Pricing Model ~CAPM! is that the pricing kernel is linear in a single factor, the portfolio of aggregate wealth. Numerous studies over the past two decades have documented violations of this restriction. 1 In response, researchers have examined the performance of alternative models of asset prices. These models have generally fallen into two classes: ~1! multifactor models such as Ross ’ APT or Merton’s ICAPM, in which factors in addition to the market return determine asset prices; or ~2! nonparametric models, such as Bansal et al. ~1993!, Bansal and Viswanathan ~1993!, and Chapman ~1997!, in which the pricing kernel is not

This paper analyzes the integration process of European equity markets since the 1980s. Its central focus is on the role that EMU, and specifically, changes in exchange rate volatility, has played in this process of financial integration. Building on an uncovered interest rate parity condition to measure financial integration, a trivariate GARCH model with time-varying coefficients yields three key results: first, European equity markets have become highly integrated only since 1996. Second, the Euro area market has gained considerably in importance in world financial markets and has taken over from the US as the dominant market in Europe.And third, the integration of European equity markets is in large part explained by the drive towards EMU, and in particular the elimination of exchange rate volatility and uncertainty in the process of monetary unification. JEL classification: C32, F3, G15 Keywords: financial integration, stock markets, EMU, exchange rate volatility, GARCH model, timevariation. 5 ECB Working Paper No 48 March 2001 6 ECB Working Paper No 48 March 2001 1

This paper examines the impact of globalization on the cost of equity capital. We argue that the cost of equity capital decreases because of globalization for two important reasons. First, the expected return that investors require to invest in equity to compensate them for the risk they bear generally falls. Second, the agency costs which make it harder and more expensive for firms to raise funds become less important. The existing empirical evidence is consistent with the theoretical prediction that globalization decreases the cost of capital, but the documented effects are lower than theory leads us to expect. We discuss various reasons for why this is the case.

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 portfolio and, possibly, with exchange rate changes. The existing empirical evidence shows that a country’s risk premium depends on its covariance with the world market portfolio and that there is some evidence that exchange rate risk affects expected returns. However, the theoretical asset pricing literature relying on mean-variance optimizing investors fails in explaining the portfolio holdings of investors, equity flows, and the time-varying properties of correlations across countries. The home bias has the effect of increasing local influences on asset prices, while equity flows and cross-country correlations increase