Cross-border mergers and acquisitions activities (M&As) sharply increased over the last two decades, partly as a result of financial liberalization policies, government policies and regional agreements. In this paper, we identify some of the main forces driving M&As, using a unique database on...

Gravity models have been widely used to describe bilateral trade in goods. Portes and Rey [Portes, R., Rey, H., 2005. The Determinants of Cross-Border Equity Flows. Journal of International Economics, 65(2), 269–296.] applied this framework to cross-border equity flows and found that distance,...

Despite the liberalization of capital flows among OECD countries, equity home bias remains sizable. We depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias: transaction costs that impede international diversification, and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk...

This paper analyzes the determinants of cross-border asset trade on cross-country data and a Swedish data set. We focus our analysis on the impact of the euro for the determinants of trade in bonds, equity and banking assets. With the help of a theoretical model, we disentangle the different...

Using aggregate data on bilateral cross-border equity holdings, we investigate whether investors correctly hedge their over-exposure to domestic risk (the well-known equity home bias) by investing in foreign stock markets that have low correlation with their home stock market. To deal with the...

Prepared for the Encyclopedia of financial globalization

The paper investigates empirically the medium-term determinants of Current Accounts, Net Foreign Asset Positions and Real Exchange Rates in Low Income Countries (LICs). The authors build a new dataset for 54 LICs over the period 1981-2005. They control for the standard determinants of external...

This paper analyzes the determination of equity portfolios and country stock returns in the context of imperfectly integrated stock markets. We consider a continuous-time model of a two-country endowment economy in which the level of financial integration is captured by a proportional tax on...

Home bias is a perennial feature of international capital markets. We review various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon highlighting recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that incorporate international portfolio choices in standard two-country general equilibrium models. We refer...

Recent models of international equity portfolios exhibit two potential weaknesses. First, the structure of equilibrium equity portfolios is determined by the correlation of equity returns with real exchange rates and non financial income; yet empirically domestic equities don’t appear to be a...