Synchronization between the business cycles of Mexico and the United States. New evidence from the analysis of regional coincident indexes

In this paper we analyze the synchronization between the business cycles of US and Mexican regions. Regional economic activity in Mexico is measured using regional coincident indexes recently developed at Banco de México, while US aggregate economic activity is measured with the national coincident index of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The framework for the empirical analysis is the structural linear times series model. We find a regional pattern in the covariance between cyclical disturbances in the US and in the Mexican regions: it is higher in the Northern than in the Central and Southern regions of the country. We also find that the elasticity of Mexican regional economic activity with respect to the US's aggregate economic activity exhibits a similar pattern. Moreover, while the variance of the business cycles in the Northern, North-Central, and Central regions is mostly associated with shocks to the US economy, in the Southern region it is mostly related to specific shocks to the Mexican economy.