Crina Pungulescu
| Date of Ph.D. defense: | 10 March 2009 |
| Title of thesis: | Essays on Financial Market Integration |
| ISBN: | 978 90 5668 235 4 |
| Promotores: | Prof.dr. F.A. de Roon, Prof.dr. B.J.M. Werker |
Abstract:
Essays on Financial Market Integration is a collection of studies dedicated to the widely-reaching phenomenon of financial market integration, an ongoing process aiming towards a state where capital flows freely across countries, unhindered by any type of obstacles or barriers. Perfectly integrated markets appear at the same time theoretically desirable and practically out of reach. The essential questions are how integrated are the world's financial markets at present, what are the direction and the speed of the process, whether there is a definite trend towards integration and whether it is possible to quantify benefits and costs of market integration.
The four essays in this dissertation address these main questions and alternate a general perspective with focused analysis on specific measures of integration and regions, providing several novel answers. First, new relevant proxies are proposed to measure financial market integration. They give evidence that barriers to integration still take a toll even in developed markets, and important costs of segmentation are estimated for emerging as well as developed markets. Moreover, it is shown that integration proceeds at a higher speed for the more committed countries, a notable result being the euro effect in declining home bias. Last but not least, empirical evidence is provided to support the view that financial market integration is ultimately beneficial in real, welfare terms.
Global / English