Introducing google trends in analysing financial integration and european bank performance

This thesis analyses the relationship between financial integration and European bank performance in the period 2007 to 2016. A new proxy for financial integration is introduced: the volume of bank-specific Google queries obtained from Google Trends. It is assumed that Google Trends will show higher volumes of queries in a specific region if a bank is more integrated in that region. This offers a new way to proxy financial integration, which is furthermore compatible with the growing importance of digitalisation that has changed the banking industry as well. Even though this thesis does not provide evidence for the relationship between financial integration as proxied by bank-specific Google queries and performance in the European banking sector, it does bring a new way of using web search data in empirical research to light. As Google Trends can still be explored in numerous ways, suggestions for future research imply using web search data in new manners and different fields of economic research.