Essays on financial 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.