We study the dynamics of stock market integration and its consequences during the recent financial crisis for twenty-three developed and sixty emerging markets. We find that integration increased slightly for emerging markets but decreased for developed countries during the crisis. Moreover, we argue that the high degree of integration propagated the crisis across the global financial markets at the beginning of the crisis, but it had little effect during the crisis. We also find that integration is mostly affected by financial openness, the institutional environment, and global financial uncertainty but that these determinants vary slightly between emerging and developed markets.

Media tone constructed from 7000,000 articles from 2000 global media and 800 social media sites is found to be a genuine risk factor that cross-sectionally prices currencies. It can predict excess US dollar returns for up to six months and surpasses the no-change benchmark in predicting returns out of sample. Its predicted value contains information beyond those predicted by currency factors and business cycles. Evidence corroborates with the theory that Media tone increases investment returns, has pronounced predictive power for the currencies associated with hard-to-value characteristics, and that its predictive power increases with the number of news sources. Trading of rational investors, including banks, is associated with Media tone.