Although the lack of international portfolio diversification has long interested the financial economics literature, the role of financial intermediaries in the market for diversified portfolios has rarely been studied. In this paper, I introduce a microeconomic aspect of under-diversification by examining a new data on U.S.-based mutual fund families' global diversification. I document the fund families' investments in global equity markets and explore features of supply and demand in the mutual fund market to explain their limited global diversification. Demand estimation confirms that consumers are not only sensitive to the fund families' portfolio characteristics such as global diversification, but also to the non-portfolio characteristics such as fund family age and size. On the supply side, the model of fund families' global investment decisions uses a revealed preference approach and shows small cross-border investment frictions can justify the fund families' observed limited global diversification. Other factors such as destination country's investor protection level and fund family's investment experience significantly affect the degree of diversification as well. (JEL G11, G23, L21, F30)
We find significant evidence of asymmetric information and signaling in post-crisis offerings in the auto asset-backed securities (ABS) market. Using granular regulatory reporting data, we are able to directly measure private information and quantify its effect on signaling and pricing. We show that lenders "self-finance'' unobservably higher-quality loans by holding these loans for longer periods to signal private information. This signal is priced in initial offerings of auto ABS and accurately predicts ex-post loan performance. We also demonstrate that our results are robust to exogenous shifts in the demand and supply of auto loans. Despite an environment of post-crisis enhanced transparency and securitization standards, signaling may be motivated by inattentive investors and regulations enforcing "no adverse selection'' in constructing ABS.
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