Can Domestic Liabilities Explain the Home Bias in UK Investment Portfolios?

It has been suggested that domestic liabilities may be an important factor in explaining the existence of a home bias in international investment portfolios. This paper provides a theoretical justification for this claim in a mean-variance framework. However, an empirical analysis for the UK does not find this effect to be large. Mean-variance efficient portfolios already exhibit significant home bias relative to the world market portfolio. Further, the predicted portfolios differ considerably from the actual portfolios of UK life assurance companies and pension funds. Possible reasons for this include weaknesses in the mean-variance approach and the role of peer pressure.