Gravity models have been widely used to describe bilateral trade in goods. Portes and Rey [Portes, R., Rey, H., 2005. The Determinants of Cross-Border Equity Flows. Journal of International Economics, 65(2), 269-296.] applied this framework to cross-border equity flows and found that distance, which proxies information asymmetries, is a surprisingly very large barrier to cross-border asset trade. We adopt a different point of view and explore the complementarity between bilateral trade in goods and bilateral asset holdings in a simultaneous gravity equations framework. Providing different instruments for both endogenous variables, we show that a 10% increase in bilateral trade raises bilateral asset holdings by 6% to 7%. The reverse causality is also significant, albeit smaller. Controlling for trade, the impact of distance on asset holdings is drastically reduced.

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Home bias is a perennial feature of international capital markets. We review various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon highlighting recent developments in macroeconomic modeling that incorporate international portfolio choices in standard two-country general equilibrium models. We refer to this new literature as Open Economy Financial Macroeconomics. We focus on three broad classes of explanations: (i) hedging motives in frictionless financial markets (real exchange rate and nontradable income risk), (ii) asset trade costs in international financial markets (such as transaction costs or differences in tax treatments between national and foreign assets), and (iii) informational frictions and behavioral biases. Recent theories call for new portfolio facts beyond equity home bias. We present new evidence on cross-border asset holdings across different types of assets: equities, bonds and bank lending and new micro data on institutional holdings of equity at the fund level. These data should inform macroeconomic modeling of the open economy and a growing literature of models of delegated investment. (JEL E13, F41, G11, G12, G15)

Coeurdacier, Nicolas, and Martin, Philippe-The geography of asset trade and the euro: Insiders and outsidersThis paper analyzes the determinants of cross-border asset trade on cross-country data and a Swedish data set. We focus our analysis on the impact of the euro for the determinants of trade in bonds, equity and banking assets. With the help of a theoretical model, we disentangle the different effects that the euro may have on cross-border asset holdings for both euro zone countries and countries outside of the euro zone. We find evidence that the euro implies 1) a unilateral financial liberalization which makes it cheaper for all countries to buy euro zone assets. For bonds and equity holdings, this translates into approximately 14% and 17% lower transaction costs; 2) a preferential financial liberalization which on top of the previous effect lowers transaction costs inside the euro zone by approximately 17% and 10% for bonds and equity respectively; 3) a diversion effect due to the fact that lower transaction costs inside the euro zone entail euro countries to purchase less equity from outside the euro zone. Our empirical analysis also suggests that the elasticity of substitution between bonds inside the euro zone is three times higher than between bonds denominated in different currencies.