At first sight, the idea of investing internationally seems exciting and full of promise because of the many benefits of international portfolio investment. By investing in foreign securities, investors can participate in the growth of other countries, hedge their consumption basket against exchange rate risk, realize diversification effects and take advantage of market segmentation on a global...

We present a simple adjustment to the single-factor credit capital model, which recognizes the diversification from a multi-factor credit setting. The model can be applied to extend the Basel II regulatory framework to a general multi-factor setting, thus allowing for more accurate modeling of diversification for portfolios across various asset classes, sectors and regions, and in particular wi...

The paper provides a general equilibrium model to show how the incompleteness of international financial markets leads to insufficient industrial specialization and a depressed volume of goods trade. As international portfolio diversification is limited and productivity is uncertain, investors wish to maintain a diversified industrial structure, not specializing according to their comparative a...

We explore the link between portfolio home bias and consumption risk sharing among Italian regions using aggregated household level information on consumption, income and portfolio holdings. We propose to use data on equity fund ownership to proxy for regional home bias: equity funds are typically diversified at the national or international level and will therefore provide interregional divers...

The levels of diversification in U.S. investors’ equity portfolios present a puzzle. Today’s optimal level of diversification, measured by the rules of mean–variance portfolio theory, exceeds 300 stocks, but the average investor holds only 3 or 4 stocks. The diversification puzzle can be solved, however, in the context of behavioral portfolio theory. In behavioral portfolio theory, investors co...

1: Introduction A large literature has developed that has examined the diversification strategies most suited to a real estate portfolio. Much of this debate has centred on the relative attractiveness of regional or sector diversification. However, more recent evidence would suggest that improved diversification benefits are not purely driven by either the sector or region in which a property i...

Portfolio diversification and active risk management are essential parts of financial analysis which became even more crucial (and questioned) during and after the years of the Global Financial Crisis. We propose a novel approach to portfolio diversification using the information of searched items on Google Trends. The diversification is based on an idea that popularity of a stock measured by s...

This paper examines the performance and diversification properties of active Australian equity fund-of-funds (FoF). Simulation analysis is employed to examine portfolio performance as a function of the number of funds in the portfolio. The paper finds that as the number of funds in a FoF portfolio increases, performance improves in a mean-variance setting, however measures of skewness and kurto...

In simple one-good international macro models, the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk means that country portfolios should be heavily biased toward foreign assets. The fact that the opposite pattern of diversification is observed empirically constitutes the international diversification puzzle. We embed a portfolio choice decision in a frictionless two-country, two-good version of ...