Assessing world-wide financial integration constitutes a recurrent challenge in macroeconometrics, often addressed by visual inspections searching for data patterns. Econophysics literature enables us to build complementary, data-driven measures of financial integration using graphs. The present contribution investigates the potential and interests of a novel 3-step approach that combines several state-of-the-art procedures to i) compute graph-based representations of the multivariate dependence structure of asset prices time series representing the financial states of 32 countries world-wide ; ii) compute time series of 5 graph-based indices that characterize the time evolution of the topologies of the graph; iii) segment these time evolutions in piece-wise constant eras, using an optimization framework constructed on a multivariate multi-norm total variation penalized functional. The method shows first that it is possible to find endogenous stable eras of world-wide financial integration. Then, our results suggest that the most relevant globalization eras would be based on the historical patterns of global capital flows, while the major regulatory events of the 1970s would only appear as a cause of sub-segmentation.

The 2008 and 2011 crises have durably affected the conditions of monetary policy transmission, particularly in the euro area. However, it is generally considered that the European Central Bank’s (ECB) monetary policy truly became unconventional only at a late stage. Our contribution is threefold. We first show that the notion of “conventional” monetary policy, which is the reference of this assessment, is a recent theoretical construction. Secondly, the mandate of the ECB, which is its institutional expression, may raise specific difficulties in managing major financial crises, particularly with regards to the forward guidance of expectations and the commitment to an accommodative policy. Finally, the resulting policies have, at this stage, paradoxically achieved acceptable levels of macroeconomic and overall financial stability, but failed to restore a private funding supply to the banking sector enabling it to play its normal role in financing economic activity.

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