Corporate Governance and the Home Bias

Magnus Dahlquist (), Lee Pinkowitz, René M. Stulz and Rohan Williamson
Additional contact information
Magnus Dahlquist: Swedish Institute for Financial Research, Postal: Saltmätargatan 19A, SE-113 59 Stockholm, Sweden, http://www.sifr.org
Lee Pinkowitz: Georgetown University
Rohan Williamson: Georgetown University

No 11, SIFR Research Report Series from Institute for Financial Research

Abstract: This paper shows that there is a close relation between corporate governance and the portfolios held by investors. Most firms in countries with poor investor protection are controlled by large shareholders, so that only a fraction of the shares issued by firms in these countries can be freely traded and held by portfolio investors. We show that the prevalence of closely-held firms in most countries helps explain why these countries exhibit a home bias in share holdings and why U.S. investors underweight foreign countries in their portfolios. We construct an estimate of the world portfolio of shares available to investors who are not controlling shareholders (the world float portfolio). The world float portfolio differs sharply from the world market portfolio. In regression explaining the portfolio weights of U.S. investors, the world float portfolio has a positive significant coefficient but the world market portfolio has no additional explanatory power. This result holds when we control for country characteristics. An analysis of foreign investor holdings at the firm level for Sweden confirms the importance of the float portfolio as a determinant of these holdings.

Keywords: World float portfolio; Portfolio choice; Closely held shares (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 G12 G15 G32 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn
Date: 2002-11-15
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Related works:
Working Paper: Corporate Governance and the Home Bias (2001)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:sifrwp:0011

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