Banking Integration in Europe: a Cointegration-Based Network Approach

Assuming the general efficiency of asset markets and ability of investors to identify banks' business prospectives and risks, banks' stock prices provide useful information on their economic condition In this paper, we suggest to use the information on European banks' stock prices to identify the state of European banking market integration. We first identify, the long-run relationships in the European banking markets (as perceived by investors) by employing Engle-Granger cointegration analysis. We then construct cointegration-based networks through cointegration coefficient matrix to illustrate the whole range of available information. The bi-directed and weighted cointegration-based network is used to find most influential banks in Europe and characterize the state of market integration over several time periods of market enlargement, global financial crisis and European sovereign debt crisis. We furthermore investigate the influence of particular banks and countries by PageRank algorithm. The discovered cointegration-based networks illustrate banks' exposures to common risks in the European banking market, which in times of crises should be also considered the most stable and predominant channels of contagion.