The paper focuses on capital market integration at sovereign bond market in eleven selected euro zone countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain). The first main objective is to test the degree of capital market integration before and after the crisis using Germany as a benchmark country and also among them as well. Secondly it evaluates and provides reasons of capital integration in time. The examination is applied through i) sigma convergence ii) yield spreads iii) correlation matrix iv) cointegration tests. I found almost zero yield differences before crisis. After 2008 results show segmentation in euro zone countries with certain special characteristic for countries with high credit ratings.

In the literature, the impact of multinationality on the valuation of multinational companies is heavily debated. To understand this impact on valuation, we need to clarify whether and how multinationality affects systematic risk. For this purpose, we analyze the state of research concerning the impact of corporate multinationality on systematic risk, conducting a systematic literature review of 35 studies and a univariate meta-analysis based on 20 studies. We test the predictions of the upstream–downstream hypothesis and the increasing capital market integration hypothesis on the basis of a meta-regression analysis of 17 studies. Our results provide no empirical support for the upstream–downstream hypothesis. However, they corroborate the capital market integration hypothesis in a more radical manner than expected: whereas multinationality seemed to have a risk-reducing effect until the beginning of the 1990s, since then its impact appears to have shifted. We find a risk-increasing effect for multinationality from 1990 on. Our results have important implications for academic research and managerial practice.

This dissertation concentrates on the interplay between politics and financial markets using various empirical tools applied on historical financial statistics. The first essay examines the effect of stock transaction taxation on trading activity and asset prices, specifically focusing on the case of early 20th century Sweden. The main finding is that the tax substantially reduced trading as well as the level of asset prices. In the second essay, modern ex post historical writing is contrasted with the ex ante views of contemporaries which are estimated from historical price data. The specific case study is the events around World War II related to the Nordic countries and Germany. The comparisons point out considerable differences between the assessments of historical events in the ex post and ex ante approaches. The third essay is an empirical study of price controls on asset price movements and how these controls affect asset returns. The study finds that the controls have large significant effects which even may influence estimates of the long-run equity premium. Altogether, this raises concerns about the use of century-long series of asset returns without correcting for the impact of institutional variation and market constraints. Finally, the fourth essay examines the growth effects of international financial liberalization and integration using a large country- industry sample from the 1980s. The main result is that industries highly dependent on external financing do not experience higher value added growth in countries with liberalized financial markets. Liberalization does, however, increase the growth rates of both output and firm creation among externally dependent industries. These results are consistent both with increased competition and increased outsourcing. / <p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2003</p>