Institutional investors’ allocation to emerging markets: A panel approach to asset demand.

This study assesses the factors driving insurance companies and pension funds’ portfolio allocation to emerging market assets. By making use of the Emerging Portfolio Fund Research database, it estimates asset demand equations for emerging markets’ equities and bonds for insurance companies and pension funds from advanced countries. These are estimated by using recent advances in the literature on panel autoregressive distributed lag models. Two key results emerge: firstly, consistent with ‘search for yield’ investment behaviour, weaker balance sheet conditions, measured by the lower funding level of pension funds, positively affect the asset allocation to emerging markets. Secondly, the accumulation of reserves by emerging markets is a significant attractor of foreign institutional investment.