Hilla Skiba

Information Acquisition, International Under-Diversification and Portfolio Performance of Institutional Investors

We test whether 1) institutional investors with concentrated international holdings outperform internationally diversified investors, and 2) foreign investors with information advantage, measured by cultural and geographic proximity to the target market, outperform other foreign investors. Using the United States as a target market, we document that investors concentrated in US securities do not outperform other investors. This result contradicts the idea that internationally under-diversified portfolios are mean-variance efficient due to the benefits of economies of scale and specialization. However, cultural similarity and geographic proximity to the US enhance investors’ performance in US securities.

Information Advantage and Institutional Investors’ Performance in Foreign Markets

Traditional portfolio theory predicts that investors’ portfolios should be diversified across international markets. In contrast, empirical studies document that investors are more likely to invest in their home country and in familiar foreign markets. These findings imply that investors do not take advantage of international diversification opportunities. This study focuses specifically on foreign market asset allocations and examines empirically whether the familiarity driven foreign portfolio investment is a rational choice attributed to information advantage. Using a sample of over 46,000 institutional investors from 46 countries, we show that investors overweight foreign markets that are familiar but also earn higher risk-adjusted returns in those markets. Furthermore, we document that more skilled investors benefit the most from familiarity based allocations.

Short Sale Restrictions, Differences of Opinion, and Closed-End Fund Discount

The purpose of this paper is to study the closed-end fund discount in Miller’s (1977) framework. Miller’s theory states that in the simultaneous presence of (1) short sale restrictions and (2) dispersion of investors’ opinions, securities become overvalued. We show that discounts of single-country closed-end funds are related to overpricing of the securities in the foreign market due to Miller’s two conditions. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that either dispersion of investor opinions or short sale restrictions alone are not positively related to the discount. However, when both conditions exist simultaneously, the observed fund discounts are significantly larger.