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Trying to Explain Home Bias in Equities and Consumption

Karen K. Lewis

University of Pennsylvania and NBER

Journal of Economic Literature 1999

Investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest, a phenomenon called “equity home bias.” In the absence of this bias, investors would optimally diversify domestic output risk using foreign equities. Therefore, consumption growth rates would tend to co-move across countries even when output growth rates do not. Empirically, however, consumption growth rates tend to have a lower correlation across countries than do output growth rates, a phenomenon I call “consumption home bias.” In this paper, I discuss these two biases and their potential relationship as suggested by the literature.

DOI
10.1257/jel.37.2.571
Volume
37 (2)
Pages
571-608
Language
en
Export
BibTeX
Sources
crossref openalex