This paper characterizes the business cycle as a recurring Markov chain for a broad set of developed and developing countries. The objective is to understand differences in cyclical phenomena across a broad range of countries based on the behavior of two key economic times series - industrial...

This paper presents a variance decomposition method - factor analysis with Procrustes rotation - that is capable of separating the global, regional and idiosyncratic components of various financial market indicators. The method is applied to indicators of five key financial markets: sovereign...