We assess Euro Area financial integration correcting for the role of “onshore offshore financial centers” (OOFCs) within the currency union. The OOFCs of Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands serve dual roles as hubs of investment fund intermediation and centers of securities issuance by foreign firms. We provide new estimates of Euro Area countries’ bilateral external portfolio investments which look through both roles, attributing the wealth held via investment funds to the underlying holders and linking securities issuance to the ultimate parent firms. Our estimates show that the Euro Area is less financially integrated than it appears, both vis-à-vis the rest of the world and within the union. Portfolio exposures of the Euro Area to other major economies such as the United States and to foreign currency assets are nearly halved in size. While official data suggests a sharp decline in portfolio home bias among Euro Area countries relative to global trends following the introduction of the euro, we demonstrate that this pattern only remains true for bond portfolios, while it is artificially generated by OOFC activities for equity portfolios. We link these dynamics to investors’ preferences toward debt assets denominated in their home currency, with an important role of the common currency in capital market integration.

Drawing on the experiences of the historical Eurodollar market and recent Chinese dollar bond issuances traded outside U.S. jurisdiction at negative spreads to Treasurys, we examine the conditions under which a parallel offshore dollar financial system that circumvents Western sanctions may emerge. We propose a model in which currency use is driven by liquidity provision and safe bond supply. We characterize three equilibrium regimes: high convenience yields emerge in both the initial sanctions-driven region and the final liquidity-driven region, separated by an intermediate region. Transitions between equilibria depend on safe-asset supply and liquidity technologies, in addition to endogenous dynamic complementarities.

I show that investor composition impacts bond price dynamics and capital allocation during crises. Using large-scale holdings data and within-firm ownership variation across near-identical bonds, I causally identify bond returns’ investor composition elasticities. Corporate bonds held predominantly by insurers rather than mutual funds suffer milder losses in downturns: increasing insurer holdings by half a bond’s size causes 20% shallower drawdowns. A shift-share instrument isolates variation from large insurers’ idiosyncratic primary-market allocations. Differences in intermediaries’ liability structures drive these results, which hold across countries. During crises, firms with more stable bondholders maintain higher borrowing at lower cost and invest more.

Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their true economic location in official statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities issued by firms in tax havens with their issuer’s ultimate parent and restate bilateral investment positions to better reflect the financial linkages connecting countries around the world. Bilateral portfolio investment from developed countries to firms in large emerging markets is dramatically larger than previously thought. The national accounts of the United States, for example, understate the U.S. position in Chinese firms by nearly 600 billion dollars. Further, we demonstrate how offshore issuance in tax havens affects our understanding of the currency composition of external portfolio liabilities and the nature of foreign direct investment. Finally, we provide additional restatements of bilateral investment positions, including one based on the geographic distribution of sales.