Looking through cross-border positions in investment funds: evidence from Italy

Valerio Della Corte, Stefano Federico and Alberto Felettigh

No 439, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Motivated by the increasingly large weight of foreign investment funds on the portfolio of Italian residents, this paper provides an estimate of the composition, by instrument and by issuer country, of Italy�s portfolio assets after �looking through� cross-border positions in investment funds. Our main findings suggest that removing the statistical opacity arising from cross-border positions in investment funds has a significant impact on the composition of Italy�s portfolio investments. After �looking through� foreign funds� holdings, the share of debt securities on portfolio assets, which is equal to 40 per cent in the unadjusted data, rises to 75 per cent. The country composition of external portfolio assets also fundamentally changes in the direction of increasing its geographical diversification. The United States becomes Italy�s main destination country; the shares of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain also increase, while that of Luxembourg, where most of the foreign investment funds are domiciled, drastically falls.

Keywords: asset allocation; home bias; mutual funds; portfolio investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F36 F65 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2018-0439/QEF_439_18.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Looking through cross-border positions in investment funds: evidence from Italy (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_439_18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().