Major currency areas are characterized by important differences in financial structure that are clear in microeconomic data. Surprisingly, this fact is seldom discussed in the analysis of the international transmission of shocks. This paper attempts to fill this gap. First, I show some stylized...

With a view to establishing a Capital Markets Union (CMU), efforts to integrate (private) capital markets and private risk-sharing in the European Union are underway. However, the single (capital) market will be burdened by a perennial potential threat to sovereign bond market stability in the...

The first Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in 1996 has provided the principal multilateral platform for interregional cooperation between the European and Asian countries. This book examines the equity market integration among 49 ASEM members both in EU and Asia, and to investigate whether such...

This paper presents a detailed set of new, quantity-based indicators of financial integration in the euro area. The indicators are based on granular data from securities holdings statistics and help us disentangle the main drivers of the portfolio changes observed since the financial crisis....

Conventional wisdom suggests that financial liberalization can help countries insure against idiosyncratic risk. There is little evidence, however, that countries have increased risk sharing despite recent widespread financial liberalization. This work shows that the key to understanding this...

The paper analyses the transmission of global financial shocks to individual member states of the European Monetary Union (EMU), in which monetary policy is delegated to the ECB and financial markets are fully integrated. Using a panel VAR model, we show that the asymmetric effects of global...

This paper criticises the standard methodology used to measure the importance of different channels of risk sharing in federal states such as the one used in Asdrubali et al.'s (1996) seminal contribution. It argues that the methodology chosen in these papers systematically underestimates the...

Our research aims to analyze the causal relationships in the behavior of public debt issued by peripheral member countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with special emphasis on the recent episodes of crisis triggered in the eurozone sovereign debt markets since 2009. With...

We construct a new indicator of de facto financial integration in the EU. The resulting indicator is pro-cyclical as it evolves along the cyclical pattern of economic activity in the European Union. It is then appended to a set of relevant financial and macroeconomic variables, within a FAVAR...