We develop a tractable asset pricing model of international equity markets to investigate the impact of frictions in cross-border financial investments on equity return dynamics and cross-border equity holdings across countries. We characterize the equilibrium of the model analytically at the limit as one country becomes large relative to all other countries. Our results clarify the distinct impact of cross-border holding costs, cash-flow fundamentals comovement, and preferences on cross-border portfolio holdings, return comovement, and risk premia. The model offers a unified explanation for key empirical regularities in the cross-section of equity markets regarding cross-country return correlations, CAPM pricing errors, and equity portfolio home bias, which we document using aggregate return and portfolio holdings data from the U.S. and a cross-section of 40 other countries. Overall, our results suggest that asset pricing tests for international equity markets should take into account differences across countries in the degree of cross-border frictions.

This paper investigates the contribution of entrepreneurship to increasing U.S. wealth inequality. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), I document that, since 2000, the increase in the wealth shares of the top 0.1% and 1% groups of households is almost exclusively driven by entrepreneurs, identified empirically as private business owner-managers. Additional evidence from the SCF points to an increase in the average returns to entrepreneurial ventures as a likely driver of these patterns. I develop analytical characterizations of summary measures of inequality in the context of a model of wealth accumulation featuring heterogeneity in investment returns and in labor earnings across households in order to examine the restrictions that the wealth distribution imposes on the underlying return heterogeneity. To match the relative position of entrepreneurs across the wealth distribution and the level of top concentration in the SCF data, as well as changing inequality from the 1990s to the 2010s, the model requires high persistence of entrepreneurial status across households and a substantial increase in the average excess return to entrepreneurial investments. The associated slow transition dynamics of the wealth distribution in the model imply that, if not reversed, recent structural shifts may lead to widening inequality for many years to come.