This paper investigates which shocks drive asynchrony of business cycles in the euro area. Thereby, it unites two strands of literature, those on common features and on structural VAR analysis. In particular, we show that the presence of a common cycle implies collinearity of structural impulse...

In this paper we estimate a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with factor stochastic volatility in the error term to assess the effects of an uncertainty shock in the Euro area. This allows us to treat macroeconomic uncertainty as a latent quantity during estimation. Only a limited number of...