Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence

Start: 03/19/2018 14:00

End: 03/19/2018 16:00

Location: MTA Humán Tudományok Kutatóháza, Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4. fszt. K13.

Description

Darvas Zsolt: Institutional investors and home bias in financial investments
/Zsolt Darvas and Dirk Schoenmaker/ - February 2018

Abstract

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower
home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing.

We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the
literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only
listed equities. We also consider unlisted equites and show that equity
home bias is much higher than previous studies perceived. We also analyse
home bias in debt securities holdings, and euro-area bias. We conclude
that European Union membership may foster financial integration and reduce
information barriers, which sometimes limit cross-country diversification.

We calculate home bias indicators for the aggregate of the euro area as if
the euro area was a single country and report remarkable similarity
between the euro area and the United States in terms of equity home bias,
while there is a higher level of debt home bias in the United States than
in the euro area as a whole.

We develop a new pension fund foreign investment restrictions index to
control for the impact of prudential regulations on the ability of
institutional investors to diversify geographically across borders.

Our panel regression estimates for 25 advanced and emerging countries in
2001-14 provide strong support for the hypothesis that the larger the
assets managed by institutional investors (defined as pension funds,
insurance companies and investment funds), the smaller the home bias and
thereby the greater the scope for risk sharing.