We examine how mutual funds from 26 developed and developing countries allocate their investment between domestic and foreign equity markets and what factors determine their asset allocations worldwide. We find robust evidence that these funds, in aggregate, allocate a disproportionately larger fraction of investment to domestic stocks. Results indicate that the stock market development and familiarity variables have significant, but asymmetric, effects on the domestic bias (domestic investors overweighting the local markets) and foreign bias (foreign investors under or overweighting the overseas markets), and that economic development, capital controls, and withholding tax variables have significant effects only on the foreign bias. Copyright 2005 by The American Finance Association.

We test the assertion that a consequence of voluntarily adopting International Accounting Standards (IAS) is the enhanced ability to attract foreign capital. Using a unique database that reports firm‐level holdings of over 25,000 mutual funds from around the world, our multivariate tests find that average foreign mutual fund ownership is significantly higher among IAS adopters. We also find that IAS adopters in poorer information environments and with lower visibility have higher levels of foreign investment, consistent with firms using IAS adoption to provide more information and/or information in a more familiar form to foreign investors. Taken together, our findings are consistent with voluntary IAS adoption reducing home bias among foreign investors and thereby improving capital allocation efficiency.

Using a new unique data set on mutual fund stockholdings, we identify several interesting similarities and differences in the stock preferences of domestic and foreign fund managers from 11 developed countries. Results show that both groups of managers prefer stocks with high return on equity, large turnover, and low return variability, and that they also exhibit differential investment behavior. Domestic managers also favor firms that pay large dividends, have low financial distress and high growth potential, whereas foreign managers prefer to invest in corporations that are globally well known. The demand for globally visible stocks by foreign managers is especially strong when their fund mandate is to diversify globally or across regions, and is weakened when their stock holdings are concentrated mainly in a specific local market. The results also show no difference in the stock preferences of American-, European- and Asian-based funds. In general, our overall evidence suggests that the differential mandates of fund managers and hence the geographic allocations of their fund investments influence their stock preferences, but not the geographic location of the managers. Journal of International Business Studies (2006) 37, 407–429. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400195

Previous studies of the quality of market-forecasted volatility have used the volatility that is implied by exchange-traded option prices. The use of implied volatility in estimating the market view of future volatility has suffered from variable measurement errors, such as the non-synchronization of option and underlying asset prices, the expiration-day effect, and the The authors thank Yong Cher for his research assistance, and Louis Ederington, Michael Melvin, Lilian Ng, Gunter Dufey, Robin Grieves, Phillipe Chen, the participants at the CREFS workshop at the Nanyang Business School, and those at the 2001 FMA Annual Meeting in Toronto for their helpful comments. The authors also thank the Journal of Futures Markets editor, Robert I. Webb, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Support for this project was provided by the CREFS at the Nanyang Business School. Campa and Chang (1995) also employed quoted implied volatility in their study. However, their objective differed from this study in that they investigated whether forward quoted implied volatility had any predictive power for future quoted implied volatility. Their data was supplied by a major commercial bank. The data that is employed in this study was obtained from Bloomberg, which collected them from major quoting banks. volatility smile effect. This study circumvents these problems by using the quoted implied volatility from the over-the-counter (OTC) currency option market, in which traders quote prices in terms of volatility. Furthermore, the OTC currency options have daily quotes for standard maturities, which allows the study to look at the market's ability to forecast future volatility for different horizons. The study finds that quoted implied volatility subsumes the information content of historically based forecasts at shorter horizons, and the former is as good as the latter at longer horizons. These results are consistent with the argument that measurement errors have a substantial effect on the implied volatility estimator and the quality of the inferences that are based on it.

No abstract