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Look at Me Now: What Attracts U.S. Shareholders?

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Author Info
John Ammer
Sara B. Holland
David C. Smith
Francis E. Warnock
Abstract

This paper investigates the underlying determinants of home bias using a comprehensive data set on U.S. investors' aggregate holdings of every foreign stock. Among those foreign stocks that are not listed on U.S. exchanges, which account for more than 96 percent of our usable data sample, we find that U.S. investors prefer firms with characteristics associated with greater information transparency, such as stronger home-country accounting standards. We document that a U.S. cross-listing is economically important, as U.S. ownership of a foreign firm roughly doubles upon cross-listing in the United States. We explore the cross-sectional variation in this "cross-listing effect" and find that the increase in U.S. investment is greatest for firms that are from weak accounting backgrounds and are otherwise informationally opaque, suggesting that the key effect of cross-listing is improvements in disclosure that are valued by U.S. investors. By contrast, cross-listing does not increase the appeal of stocks from countries with weak shareholder rights, suggesting that U.S. cross-listing cannot substitute for legal protections in the home country. Nor does the cross-listing effect appear to be driven simply by increased "familiarity"� with the stock or lowered cross-border transactions costs.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 12500.

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Date of creation: Aug 2006
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12500

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets
G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
M4 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Accounting

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Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Mihir A. Desai & Dhammika Dharmapala, 2007. "Taxes, Institutions and Foreign Diversification Opportunities," NBER Working Papers 13132, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  2. Mihir A. Desai & Dhammika Dharmapala, 2007. "Taxes and Portfolio Choice: Evidence from JGTRRA's Treatment of International Dividends," NBER Working Papers 13281, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Dimitrios Christelis & Dimitris Georgarakos, 2008. "Investing at Home and Abroad: Different Costs, Different People?," CSEF Working Papers 188, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy. [Downloadable!]
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