A bibliometric review of financial market integration literature

Abstract

We undertake a meta-literature review on the topic of financial market integration (FMI), covering 260 articles from 1981 to 2021. Our review consists of quantitative analysis of bibliometric citations concomitant with qualitative analysis of content, towards a goal of identifying primary research streams and proposing directions for future research. We identify five research groups: (1) portfolio diversification with financial market integration; (2) general equity market integration; (3) financial market linkage with respect to crises and events; (4) time-varying financial market integration; and (5) co-movements and spillovers between commodities and financial markets; as well as present a wide array of future research directions. We conduct an extensive review of FMI literature, answering several questions: (1) What is the domain of FMI research?; (2) What are the influential aspects of top journals and authors, and the characteristics of the most studied topics?; (3) What are the past and current key research streams in FMI literature?; and (4) What are the substantial future relevant research questions to explore regarding FMI? Given the ongoing attention on financial market integration by both academicians and policy makers, our results should be of great interest.