I show that the principal components analysis can be used to quantify the degree of economic integration, trace its evolution over time, and capture episodes of market segmentation. Based on long series of sovereign bond data for fifteen industrialized economies I document clear evidence of...

We study the degree of output and consumption asymmetry for the ten new and fifteen original European Union members during the period 1994–2001. We establish basic stylized facts about macroeconomic asymmetry from correlations of GDP and consumption growth rates with corresponding aggregates....

Access to world capital markets and net investment income flows between countries help protect national income from country-specific output shocks. I empirically study what factors explain cross-country differences in the extent of risk sharing from international factor income. An index of...

We estimate potential welfare gains from financial integration and corresponding better insurance against country-specific shocks to output (risk sharing) for the twenty-five European Union countries. Using theoretical utility-based measures we express the gains from risk sharing as the utility...

We quantify the causal effect of foreign investment on total factor productivity (tfp) using a new global firm-level database. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting the difference in the amount of foreign investment by financial and industrial investors and simultaneously controlling...

We decompose capital flows--both debt and equity--into public and private components and study their relationship with productivity growth. This exercise reveals that international capital flows are mainly shaped by government decisions and sovereign to sovereign transactions. Specifically, we...

See also a publication with a similar title in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261560611001161">'Journal of International Money and Finance'</A>, 30(7), 1535-61.<p>Using long time series for sovereign bond markets of fifteen industrialized economies from 1875 to 2009, I find that financial market integration by the end of the 20th century was higher...</p></a>