 Nontraded Goods, Nontraded Factors, and International Non-DiversificationMarianne Baxter (mbaxter@bu.edu), Urban Jermann and Robert King (rking@bu.edu) No 5175, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: Can the presence of nontraded consumption goods explain the high degree of 'home bias' displayed by investor portfolios? We find that the answer is no, so long as individuals have access to free international trade in financial assets. In particular, it is never optimal to exhibit home bias with respect to domestic traded-good equities. By contrast, an optimal portfolio may exhibit substantial home bias with respect to nontraded-good equities, although this result requires a very low degree of substitution between traded and nontraded goods in the utility function. Further, our analysis uncovers a second puzzle: the composition of investors' portfolios appears to be strongly at variance with the predictions of the model that incorporates nontraded goods. Date: 1995-07 Published as Journal of International Economics, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 1998): 211-229. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5175 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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