We study how investor's persistent preference to invest more in the home market — “home bias” — is affecting investor's efforts to mitigate risks associated with climate change. When investors have a tendency to tilt their portfolio towards domestic assets, the carbon intensity in the...

With the adoption of the Paris Agreement in December 2015, better understanding of portfolio carbon dioxide (CO2) exposures has become increasingly important for investors, regulators and society at large. In this paper we measure the portfolio carbon footprints (CFPs) of pension funds' stock...

In recent years, the green bond market has seen significant growth as a means of financing environmentally friendly projects. However, while much research has focused on pricing, little attention has been given to the investors who hold these bonds. This paper uses a preferred habitat framework...

The Securities Holdings Statistics (SHS), which are collected by the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), have been the subject of extensive research over the past decade. SHS offer detailed information on portfolios, including individual securities data. SHS benefits from high coverage of...

We analyze how global and local factors affect portfolio allocation by euro area investors in emerging markets at the bond-level. First, cross-sectional analysis reveals a strong preference for home (Euro) currency bonds. Second, panel regressions, whether at the bond or aggregate flows level,...

This study investigates whether banks and insurance corporations perform regulatory arbitrage by buying bonds with inflated credit ratings. We argue that credit rating based capital requirements incentivize banks and insurance corporations to hold more bonds with inflated credit ratings. We...

Quantitative easing (QE) aims to lower long term interest rates and stimulate economic growth via the portfolio rebalancing channel. One of the assumptions for QE to work is that there are investors with strong preferences to hold long term bonds, i.e. so called preferred habitat investors. This...

This study investigates the impact of the Eurosystem's Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) on the micro market structure of sovereign bonds. In particular, we analyze how the PSPP affected the ownership concentration of PSPP-eligible bonds. In line with portfolio rebalancing models we...

In this paper we show empirically how international investment positions are determined by investor heterogeneity and individual security characteristics. We do so by estimating a gravity model with newly available data that contains both domestic and international holdings of individual sectors...