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Review of Finance Vol. 22 No. 4 2018

A Measure of Pure Home Bias

Ian A. Cooper1; Piet Sercu2; Rosanne Vanpée2

1 London Business School · 2 KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business

open access

Abstract

The literature on international equity holdings distinguishes between home bias (overweighting of home stocks) and foreign bias (relative underweighting for more “distant” countries). The two biases can be integrated into one distance-based model. We define pure home bias as the excess of home bias relative to this model, and find pure home bias only in emerging markets. Countries with high tax rates and low credit standing have higher pure home bias, and more development comes with lower distance aversion. Methodologically, the choice of portfolio bias measure matters. We find the best measure to be a covariance-based measure relative to the world average.

DOI
10.1093/rof/rfx005
Volume
22
Issue
4
Pages
1469-1514
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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