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Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 97 No. 2 2010

The world price of home bias

Sie Ting Lau1; Lilian Ng2,3; Bohui Zhang4,5

1 Nanyang Technological University · 2 University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee · 3 York University · 4 Research Network (United States) · 5 UNSW Sydney

Abstract

Theoretical arguments suggest that as the degree of a country's home bias increases, the global risk sharing between domestic and foreign investors will reduce and thereby increase the country's cost of capital. Consistent with this prediction, we find international differences in the cost of capital to be strongly and positively related to varying degrees of home bias for 38 markets. This finding is robust to different cost of capital proxies, different control variables, alternative home-bias measures, international tradability of stocks, and alternative specifications. Therefore, the overall evidence implies that countries may enjoy a significantly lower cost of capital by reducing the extent of their home bias and hence, increasing global risk sharing.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfineco.2010.04.002
Volume
97
Issue
2
Pages
191-217
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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