A note on the long-run benefits from international equity diversification for a Taiwan investor diversifying in the US equity market

This note provides evidence that long-run benefits exist for Taiwanese investors diversifying into the US equity market over the period of January 5, 1995 to February 16, 2001. The evidence is based on tests for pairwise cointegration between the Taiwanese national equity index and the equity index for the US. We use five cointegrating tests, namely, the Multivariate Trace statistic, Harris-Inder approach, the Johansen method, the KSS approach, and the partial structural model of Bai and Perron [Bai, J., & Perron, P. (2003). Computation and analysis of multiple structural change models. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 18, 1-22]. The results from these five tests are consistent and suggest that the Taiwanese stock market is not pairwise cointegrated with the US stock market. This finding should prove valuable to individual investors and financial institutions holding long-run investment portfolios in these two markets.