Abstract:

: This paper explores the implications of consumption heterogeneity between domestic and foreign investors on the cross-section of stock returns in a host country. We argue that foreign investors in a small open economy integrated into global financial markets may face consumption risk, which could result in risk premia being reflected in stock returns. To account for the potential influence of foreign investors on asset prices in a host country, we develop a two-country durable consumption model under market incompleteness, which extends the one-country durable consumption model. The proposed model includes both domestic and foreign pricing factors. We investigate the empirical performance of our model with Fama–French portfolios for Korea, taking U.S. investors as representative foreign investors. The empirical results advocate the two-country durable consumption model, confirming the significant role of foreign factors in the cross-section of domestic stock returns. Additionally, R 2 tests conducted with different sets of test assets show that the explanatory power of our model is comparable to that of the Fama–French three-factor model.

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