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Review of Finance Vol. 12 No. 4 2008

Estimating the Costs of International Equity Investments

Piet Sercu1; Rosanne Vanpée2

1 1 K.U. Leuven · 2 2 Fortis Investments

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Abstract

Generalizing Cooper-Kaplanis (1994), we estimate implied costs that reconcile international portfolios with InCAPM predictions. Costs depend on home- and host-country characteristics and on interactions; we estimate risk tolerance rather than pre-specifying it; and we control for currency risk, inflation hedging, fixed-interest investments, round-tripping and omitted countries. Estimates for developed markets are lower than reported before, but those for new markets are quite high: 2001-2004 inward shadow costs range from 0.01 %p.a. (US) to 37 (Indonesia). We find that equity home bias is related to a mixture of risks and frictions, such as information asymmetries, institutional factors and explicit costs.

DOI
10.1093/rof/rfn021
Volume
12
Issue
4
Pages
587-634
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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