Does Institutional Ownership Matter for International Stock Return Comovement?

Abstract

We study the link between international stock return comovements and institutional investment. We test the hypothesis that the rise of institutional investors as shareholders of corporations worldwide has increased cross-country correlations and decreased cross-industry correlations. Using stock-level institutional holdings across 45 countries during the period 2001-2010, we find that industry and global factors are relatively more important than country factors in explaining stock return variation among stocks with higher institutional ownership. Industry diversification strategies offer more benefits than country diversification benefits for stocks with high institutional ownership. Our findings show that cross-border portfolio investment is a powerful force of international capital markets integration and convergence of asset prices across countries.