Unexploited Gains from International Diversification: Patterns of Portfolio Holdings around the World
The increase in global financial integration over the last twenty years has been remarkable, and U.S. institutional investors have been significant participants in this growth. Given standard economic theory, one would expect to see greater international diversification accompanying the expansion of global investment opportunities. To date, however, evidence on how investors actually allocate their portfolios around the world and what determines it is still limited.
In a joint paper with Roberto Rigobon, we aim to fill the gap in the literature by constructing a unique micro dataset of asset-level portfolios for a group of important institutional investors, namely US mutual funds with international investments. To shed light on the drivers of globalization and investment across countries, we explore the structure of mutual fund families. We make within-family comparisons of the behavior of “specialized funds,” which can invest only in certain countries or regions, and “global funds,” which can invest anywhere in the world and thus have access to a larger set of instruments (more firms from more countries).
- Tags:
- Financial Sector