Home Bias, an Academic Puzzle

Abstract

Only 16% (23%) of all empirical studies published in the top four (fourteen) Finance journals examine non-US markets, a fraction that is well below measures reflecting their economic importance. This “home bias” measure fluctuates across years with a weakly declining trend. There is also a “foreign bias” in which some non-US countries are more frequently the subject of published papers than others. I am able to explain only a small fraction of either the home-bias or the foreign-bias puzzles. Surprisingly, there are on average 2.01 higher annual cumulative citations per non-US paper published relative to cohort-matched US-focused papers.