Only 16% (23%) of all empirical studies published in the top four (fourteen) Finance journals examine non-US markets, a fraction that is well below measures reflecting their economic importance. This “home bias” measure fluctuates across years with a weakly declining trend. There is also a “foreign bias” in which some non-US countries are more frequently the subject of published papers than others. I am able to explain only a small fraction of either the home-bias or the foreign-bias puzzles. Surprisingly, there are on average 2.01 higher annual cumulative citations per non-US paper published relative to cohort-matched US-focused papers.

There has long prevailed a conventional wisdom rationalizing why firms pursue overseas listings. It argues that firms seek such opportunities to benefit from a lower cost of capital that arises because their shares become more accessible to global investors. Much recent evidence challenges this conventional wisdom. In fact, several new research initiatives have been proposed that factor into the overseas listing decision many more complex risks that globalization can create at the firm level, such as agency conflicts, transparency and disclosure concerns, and other corporate governance problems. The goal of this article is to survey, synthesize and critically review this new literature and to identify yet unresolved questions to answer.

Scholarship in finance has paid relatively little attention to the role of culture in financial decision-making compared to other business disciplines and economics. This paper will review what research has been done to date including a critical assessment of the key databases used to measure differences in cultural values. Notwithstanding the concerns with the measures of cultural values, I conduct an empirical analysis of the role of cultural distance for explaining the foreign bias in international portfolio holdings using traditional gravity models in international economics. I affirm the statistical explanatory power of culture for these investment biases and outline several new potential directions for research.

On November 17, 1998, trading commenced in DaimlerChrysler ordinary shares, a single global registered share (GRS) certificate, on stock exchanges around the world. The GRS quotes, trades and settles in U.S. Dollars on the New York Stock Exchange and in Deutschemarks/Euros on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange through a new global share registrar linking German and U.S. registrars and clearing facilities. This study critically evaluates the new share structure and asks whether it is associated with an improvement in market quality. I find that the initiation of the program was associated with greater trading activity and enhanced liquidity overall, but there was a significant migration of its order flow back to Frankfurt during the first 6 months. While return volatility also increased significantly, this increase was not associated with the changes in trading activity, the changes in liquidity or the flow-back to Frankfurt. I argue that this new share structure to date has not improved the quality of the trading environment relative to other share structures.

New measures of stock return volatility are developed to increase the precision of stock option price estimates. With Bayesian statistical methods, volatility estimates for a given stock are developed using prior information on the cross-sectional patterns in return volatilities for groups of stocks sorted on size, financial leverage, and trading volume. Call option values computed with the Bayesian procedure generally improve prediction accuracy for market prices of call options relative to those computed using implied volatility, standard historical volatility, or even the actual ex post volatility that occurred during each option's life. Although the Bayesian methods produce biased call price estimators, they do reduce the systematic tendency of standard pricing approaches to overprice (underprice) options on high (low) volatility stocks. Little bias improvement is observed with respect to the time to maturity and moneyness of the call options.

The Review of Financial Studies has among its missions the facilitation and promotion of a vigorous academic debate across unsettled questions in finance. This special section of Volume 29, Number 1 consists of three studies on the cross-section of expected returns. To what extent are our inferences about certain anomalous patterns in the cross-section of expected returns related to biases and inefficiencies in our testing procedures? Are all factor discoveries equally important? Do some proposed factors subsume the explanatory power of others? Is the after-trading-cost performance of some anomalies more resilient than that of others?

This paper finds that the growth and expansion of U.S. cross-listings by firms from emerging markets around the world facilitated an expansion of cross-border equity flows and overall development of their stock markets during the 1990s. However, these benefits have negative spillover effects; the capitalization and turnover ratios of local-market firms that do not pursue overseas listings decline as U.S. cross-listings in the form of American depositary receipts (ADRs) increase in size and scope. We investigate various possible sources of these negative spillovers and offer new evidence that the growth of ADRs neither facilitates nor hinders local-market development, but represent an outcome of poorly functioning local markets. Policy implications are discussed.

We propose a new multi-factor model for international stock returns that includes size, value, and momentum factor portfolios and that builds them in a partial-segmentation capital market framework. Accounting for externalities driven by the incomplete accessibility to stocks and stock markets, our model not only captures strong common variation in international stock returns but also achieves low pricing errors and rejection rates relative to pure segmentation and pure integration models. This partial-segmentation approach is evaluated using monthly returns for over 37,000 stocks from 46 developed and emerging market countries over 2 decades and for a wide variety of test assets.

We investigate the long-run return performance of non-U.S. firms that raise equity capital in U.S. markets. Overall, between 1982 and 1996, our sample of 333 global equity offerings with U.S. depositary receipt (ADR) tranches from 35 countries in Asia, Latin America, and Europe under-perform local market benchmarks of comparable firms by 8%–15% over the three years following issuance. We show that differences in long-run returns are related to the scope and magnitude of investment barriers that induce segmentation of capital markets around the world. While companies from markets with significant investment barriers for foreigners that issue equity on major U.S. exchanges outperform their benchmarks, those from segmented markets that issue equity in the U.S. by way of Rule 144A private placements significantly under-perform. We also show that inter-market competition for order flow in the post-issuance period affects long-run return performance. Post-issuance buy-and-hold abnormal returns are most significantly and positively related to the offering's ability to generate a larger share of U.S. trading volume.

In its 2010 Morrison v. National Australia Bank ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that key fraud-related provisions of U.S. securities laws would apply only to transactions in foreign securities that take place on U.S. exchanges. We document a large increase in the price of U.S. cross-listed foreign stocks relative to their currency-adjusted equivalent home-market shares around the decision, which we associate with the newly differentiated legal status accorded U.S. cross-listed shares. The market’s reaction to the decision affirms that investors value how U.S. securities laws apply an element of the “bonding” hypothesis as a motive for international cross-listings. Received June 7, 2017; editorial decision November 13, 2017 by Editor Paolo Fulghieri.