Essays on International Asset Management: Evidence for Developed West and Emerging East

Asset management is a global business, spreading from developed financial centers to emerging and transition markets. Empirical analyses of professional investors’ investment processes are justified not only by their key role in the traditional finance theory, as rational agents contributing to market efficiency, but also by the behavioral finance, finding evidence on irrational biases in their investment behavior. This study provides survey evidence on views and investment behavior of 772 fund managers from 274 investment companies in the USA, Germany, Thailand, Russia and Ukraine. New insights are gained on the persistency of behavioral biases. Cross-country comparisons shed light on fund managers’ information processing and investment behavior in different institutional market settings.