Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.3, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, language: English, abstract: This systematic literature review (SLR) aims to explore the perception of the establishment of the European Capital Markets Union (CMU) in literature. After the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Euro debt crisis lead to a recession, the task of the CMU is to stimulate the European economy, strengthen European financial integration while presenting the EU as a competitive counterpart to other global financial markets. Being part of the financial markets, Capital Markets (CMs) play an important role for financial market-oriented economies. Therefore, this paper will discuss what benefits the CMU can offer in particular for small and medium sized companies (SMEs) in terms of diversifying their funding sources in other words an increase of market-based financing.