European monetary integration was one element in the process of financial market integration but by far not the only one. The paper traces the development of financial markets and systems in Europe from the beginnings of the euromarkets in the 1950s over early exchange rate arrangements and the...

The importance of an efficient securities clearing and settlement system lies on the safer transfer of ownership of assets against payment. Such a system must be developed in a way to minimize the risks involved on securities transactions, and it must still offer lower costs, which do not hinder...

EU enlargement rests on the proven success of European unification. European monetary integration and the introduction of euro are probably the best examples of integration. The EU financial sector has been going through a large restructuring program in the last decades. There was a continuous...

We analyze foreigners' and domestic institutional investors' positions in U.S. equities. Controlling for many factors, we uncover a common preference for large firms and firms that are diversified internationally. The domestic preference for internationally diversified firms implies that...

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the degree to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in 20 countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country-specific and industry-specific...

We disentangle different driving factors of sovereign bond market integration by studying yield co-movements of EMU countries, the UK, the US and 16 German Länder in the last 15 years. At a low frequency of weeks, bond market integration has increased gradually in the course of the last 15...

We show that including distribution costs into a general equilibrium model of international portfolio choice contributes to explaining the 'home bias' in international equity investment. Our model is able to replicate observed investment positions for a wide range of parameter values, even if...

This study has investigated to which extent rating events influence sovereign bond yield spreads and overall financial market volatility. While rating agencies are part and parcel of today's financial markets, the study succeeds in tracing some independent effect that ratings exert on financial...

Financial globalisation has been associated with divergent current account patterns in emerging market economies. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account deficits. In this paper we...

The turbulences in the international financial markets during the summer and autumn of 1998 put the price formation and liquidity provision mechanism in many markets under severe strain. As part of the large-scale portfolio rebalancing that took place, investors shifted a large part of their...