Do differences in countries' accounting standards affect global investment decisions? We explore this question by examining how accounting distance, the difference in the accounting standards used in the investor's and the investee's countries, affects the asset allocation decisions of global...

In their foreign portfolio allocations, international mutual funds overweight industries that are comparatively large in their domestic stock market. Aggregate excess foreign industry allocations are sizeable, on average amounting to over 100% for the largest domestic industries. While this...

Although portfolio funds account for only about 5 percent of the capitalization of emerging stock markets, these small infusions of capital, particularly foreign portfolio investment funds, have been responsible for jump starting the development of many of these markets. The main beneficiaries...

Cross border capital flows and returns on assets are two key variables in international macroeconomics. Difficult endogeneity issues plague any analysis of their correlations in aggregate data. This paper examines the dynamics of international portfolios with a unique data set on the stock...