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.

Abstract: We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the degree to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in twenty countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country- and industry-specific shocks. We find a large and highly significant link: a firm raising its international sales by 10 percent raises the exposure of its stock return to global shocks by 2 percent and reduces its exposure to country-specific shocks by 1.5 percent. This link has grown stronger over time since the mid-1980s. JEL classification: G11, G15 Key words: diversification, risk, international financial markets, industrial structure The paper was prepared for the IMF conference on “Global Linkages. ” We thank our discussant, Kathryn Dominguez, and other participants for many helpful comments. We are also grateful to John Campbell, Stefano Cavaglia, Marcelle Chauvet, Kristin Forbes, Ashoka Mody, Geert Rouwenhorst, Dan Waggoner, participants in the 2003 AEA annual meetings session on “Global Linkages ” and the Atlanta Fed Finance Brown Bag for their suggestions, Menzie Chinn for sharing his capital account liberalization measure with us, Iskander Karibzhanov for translating some of our code into C, and Young Kim for

This paper characterizes the forces that determine time-variation in expected international asset returns. We o#er a number of innovations. By using the latent factor technique, we do not have to prespecify the sources of risk. We solve for the latent premiums and characterize their time-variation. We find evidence that the first factor premium resembles the expected return on the world market porfolio. However, the inclusion of this premium alone is not su#cient to explain the conditional variation in the returns. We find evidence of a second factor premium which is related to foreign exchange risk. Our sample includes new data on both international industry portfolios and international fixed income portfolios. We find that the two latent factor model performs better in explaining the conditional variation in asset returns than a prespecified two factor model. Finally, we show that di#erences in the risk loadings are important in accounting for the cross-sectional variation in the international returns. c 2002 Peking University Press Key Words: International investment; Asset pricing; Latent variables; Exchange rate risk; Factor models

The behavior of international stock market returns in terms of rate of return, unconditional volatility, skewness, excess kurtosis, serial dependence and long-memory is examined. A factor analysis approach is employed to identify the underlying dimensions of stock market returns. In our approach, the factors are estimated not from the observed historical returns but from their empirical properties, without imposing any restriction about the time dependence of the observations. To identify clusters of markets and multivariate outliers, factor analysis is then used to generate factor scores. The …ndings suggest the existence of meaningful factors which determine the di¤erences in terms of the dependence structure between developed and emerging market returns.

According to the international arbitrage pricing theory (IAPT) posited by Solnik (1983), home currency movements affect factor loadings and associated risk premiums. We propose an empirical model to test this proposition and perform tests using U.S. stock returns in the period 1975-2008. Our results confirm that currency movements significantly affect the market betas of a large proportion of stocks. Further cross-sectional tests indicate that currency movements affecting the market factor are significantly priced in stock returns. Based on these and other findings, we conclude that Solnik’s IAPT is supported. An important implication of our findings with respect to the stock-returns/exchange-risk puzzle is that exchange rate risk can broadly affect stock returns through both factor and residual factor channels.

Abstract: We estimate a model with country- and industry-specific shocks that extends the dummy variable model used in the portfolio diversification literature by relaxing the restriction that all stocks with exposure to a given shock have the same exposure to that shock. We find that: i) This restriction is strongly rejected by the data. ii) Many industry betas are negative, while almost all country betas are positive. This difference in within-group heterogeneity may explain why country shocks have historically outweighed industry shocks in explaining international return variation. iii) We use the betas to construct portfolios whose volatility is substantially below that of the world market, both in and out of sample. JEL classification: G11, G15 Key words: diversification, risk, international financial markets, industrial structure

The authors are grateful to José Daniel and Uli Knöss from Micropal for providing the mutual fund data. We thank Geert Rouwenhorst for help with the momentum portfolios and David Shea at Independence International Associates for providing the IIA index time series. We have benefited from helpful discussions with Felix Maag, Karl Keiber, Steffen Graf and Wolfgang Drobetz and the participants of the workshop held at Erasmus

Abstract: A stylized fact in the portfolio diversification literature is that diversifying across countries is more effective than diversifying across industries in terms of risk reduction. But with the rise in comovement across national stock markets since the mid-1990s, this no longer appears to be true. We explore whether this change is driven by global integration and therefore likely to be permanent, or if it is a temporary phenomenon associated with the recent stock market bubble. Our results point to the latter hypothesis. In the aftermath of the bubble, diversifying across countries may therefore still be effective in reducing portfolio risk. JEL classification: G11, G15

This paper provides extensive evidence on portfolio characteristics of mutual funds and studies the relation between fund performance and the fund manager's investment strategy. The results show that neither momentum characteristics nor the valuation of stocks can explain differences in fund performance. However, the paper finds a negative firm-size effect that partly explains previous findings of a negative fund-size effect. Moreover, the results show a positive relation between performance and the degree of diversification within the fund portfolio. However, diversification by including non-listed stocks does not enhance performance.

In this paper we argue that book-to-market and size attributes represent sensitivities of firm returns to several risk factors, and in so doing they subsume the information in other attributes. Although this gives them high cross-sectional explanatory power, they are not very indicative if we are concerned with testing whether an individual risk factor is priced. In that regard, claiming that financial distress is not priced, by only considering probability of bankruptcy, seems premature. Rational investors may also care about recovery rates and the relatively higher mean returns observed for small firms with very low book-to-market ratios is consistent with this view. To analyse recovery risk, we construct mimicking portfolios by sorting stocks on less noisy attributes such as fixed-assets and intangible-assets ratios. We find that recovery risk mimicking portfolios exhibit typical risk factor characteristics, and perform well in explaining the cross-section of returns. The results suggest that recovery risk factor is a good candidate to be priced, and much of the explanatory power of the size attribute comes from the fact that it embodies useful information regarding recovery risk. Overall, our findings have important portfolio management implications.