Correlations between international equity market returns tend to increase in highly volatile bear markets, which has led some to doubt the benefits of international diversification. This article solves the dynamic portfolio choice problem of a U.S. investor faced with a time-varying investment opportunity set modeled using a regime-switching process which may be characterized by correlations and volatilities that increase in bad times. International diversification is still valuable with regime changes and currency hedging imparts further benefit. The costs of ignoring the regimes are small for all-equity portfolios but increase when a conditionally risk-free asset can be held.

We propose a conditional measure of capital market integration that allows us to characterize both the cross-section and time-series of expected returns in developed and emerging markets. Our measure, which arises from a conditional regime-switching model, allows us to describe expected returns in countries that are segmented from world capital markets in one part of the sample and become integrated later in the sample. Our results suggest that a number of emerging markets exhibit time-varying integration. Interestingly, some markets appear to be more integrated than one might expect based on prior knowledge of investment restrictions.Other markets appear segmented even though foreigners have relatively free access to their capital markets.

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Contagion is usually defined as correlation between markets in excess of what would be implied by economic fundamentals; however, there is considerable disagreement regarding the definitions of the fundamentals, how the fundamentals might differ across countries, and the mechanisms that link the fundamentals to asset returns. Our research takes, as a starting point, a twofactor model with time-varying betas that accommodates various degrees of market integration between different markets. We apply this model to stock returns in three different regions: Europe, SouthEast Asia, and Latin America. In addition to providing new insights on contagion during crisis periods, we document patterns through time in world and regional market integration and measure the proportion of volatility driven by global, regional, and local factors.

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