Investors reveal a tendency to prefer domestic over foreign equities despite the financial losses. From institutional perspective the factors that cause home biasness are the barriers to entry the foreign markets, transaction costs, illiquidity, asymmetric information and information costs,...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that investor protection affects the demand for equity, but existing theories emphasize only the effect of investor protection on the supply of equity. We build a model showing that the demand for equity is important in explaining financial development. If the level...

Empirical evidences show that investors tend to be biased toward investing in domestic (home bias) and local (local bias) stocks. Familiarity is considered to be one of the reasons. A similar concept was proposed by Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999, 2002), known as the recognition heuristic: "when...