Bias in foreign equity portfolios: households versus professional investors

Non professional investors display a much higher degree of home bias than fiancial investors suggesting that they might be more severely a¤ected by information asymmetry issues. In particular, non professional investors, having less easily access to information on foreign firm-specific characteristics than institutional investors, will rely more heavily on country-specific factors. We test this conjecture restricting the analysis to foreign equity portfolios of four European investing countries -France, Italy, Spain and Sweden. We find, indeed, that households� portfolios are more strongly in�uenced by proximity variables, transparency of the destination stock market and, even more interestingly, by common-listing in the Euronext platform.