The Degree of Home Bias in the Holding of Share Portfolio: Case of American Investors

The objective of this paper is to measure the degree of Home Bias within the holdings of portfolio and to identify their determining factors. By following an intuitive reasoning, the authors have chosen a number of susceptible factors that have an impact on Home Bias. In fact, they have developed an international CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model). This model is estimated for 20 countries, with the use of cross-section econometrics. The authors' results show that all countries have recorded a high level of Home bias in their holdings of portfolio. In order to study whether the Home Bias of the newly emerging markets and that of the developed markets react differently to the determining factors or not the authors have evaluated the model so much jointly for all markets as separately for the developed and the newly emerging ones. In the case of classification of the sample, the results have permitted us to draw an important conclusion and to have cognizance that the volatility of the exchange rate is statistically significant concerning the newly emerging economies at a threshold of 1%, while it is hardly remarkable for the developed countries. This means that this variable prevents the American investors from investing in the former countries. Samely, for both variables of joint- variance and size.