Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...

We measure market integration at a firm-level for the US stock market with the rest of the world. The properties of firm-level integration are explored across time and industries and then stocks are sorted into high- and low-integration portfolios. The role of the least globally integrated US...

We estimate trends in diversification for equity, debt, and real estate within and across countries. After 2000, we uncover a marked and near ubiquitous decline in diversification, which coincides with sharply higher levels of investment risk. This decline is associated with country economic...

We present new international diversification indexes across equity, sovereign debt, and real estate. The indexes reveal a marked and near ubiquitous decline in diversification potential across asset classes and markets for the post-2000 period. Analysis of panel data suggests that the decline is...

The evidence for international diversification as a means to curtail portfolio risk relies predominantly on short-run data. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the risk reduction benefits of international investment hold in the long-run. Employing a multi-horizon non-parametric filter,...