The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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Diversification, Integration and Emerging Market Closed‐End Funds

Published: 07/01/1996   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1996.tb02709.x

GEERT BEKAERT, MICHAEL S. URIAS

We study a new class of unconditional and conditional mean‐variance spanning tests that exploits the duality between Hansen‐Jagannathan bounds (1991) and mean‐standard deviation frontiers. The tests are shown to be equivalent to standard spanning tests in population, but we document substantial differences in the small sample performance of alternative tests. Our empirical application examines the diversification benefits from emerging equity markets using an extensive new data set on U.S. and U.K.‐traded closed‐end funds. We find significant diversification benefits for the U.K. country funds, but not for the U.S. funds. The difference appears to relate to differences in portfolio holdings rather than to the behavior of premiums in the United States versus the United Kingdom.