The Financial Integration of the European Union: Common and Idiosyncratic Drivers

The purpose of this paper is to establish how far the process of financial integration has gone in the European Union. There is growing evidence that the appearance of the Euro has accelerated the integration of a number of financial markets among those countries who have adopted the Euro. We identify the growth in financial integration as the process by which idiosyncratic factors at the national level become less and less important for the behaviour of particular markets. While the Euro plays an important part because it eliminates currency risk, financial integration will still emerge between other European countries as long as the institutional and legal barriers are removed.