Portfolio allocations and the emerging equity markets of Central Europe

We examine the issue of possible diversification benefits into three leading Central European equity markets. We construct portfolios for both US and German investors using various optimization models and several risk measures. We then compare the portfolio out-of-sample performance using Sharpe ratios and the Jobson-Korkie statistic. Our results show that diversification benefits are statistically significant for US investors, but not for German investors. Optimized portfolios based on lower partial moments exhibit less diversification into the Central European markets than those based on standard deviations. Overall, we show that investors could have benefited from diversifying into the Central European equity markets. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.