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Review of Financial Studies Vol. 35 No. 7 2022

How Global Is Your Mutual Fund? International Diversification from Multinationals

Irem Demirci1; Miguel A. Ferreira2; Pedro Matos3; Clemens Sialm4

1 NOVA School of Business and Economics · 2 Nova School of Business and Economics, CEPR, and ECGI · 3 Darden School of Business, University of Virginia · 4 University of Texas at Austin and NBER

Abstract

We show that mutual funds worldwide provide substantial international exposure through their domestic holdings of multinationals. The international exposure of domestic funds increases, on average, by 32 percentage points when we consider international corporate diversification. We find that funds with higher indirect international exposure perform better in both the cross-section and the time series. This effect is primarily driven by the fund managers’ ability to invest in multinationals, rather than the performance of those multinationals. Our findings support the hypothesis that international diversification from multinationals reduces the transaction and information costs of investing abroad.

DOI
10.1093/rfs/hhab103
Volume
35
Issue
7
Pages
3337-3372
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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