Diversification Gains for a Home Biased Trader in the Emerging and Frontier Equity Markets

Abstract

We study the case of a home-biased equity trader based in Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, or Latin America, who is looking at diversifying his/her investment risks internationally within his/her region and three other emerging/frontier regions. We focus on explaining the dynamic conditional correlations between equity markets from 3 January 2002 to 11 November 2016. Timevarying opportunities for diversification are found in several nations across regions. However, diversification opportunities outside a region are largely reserved for bad times, such as during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis.