type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Much of the literature examining the effects of oil shocks asks the question “What is an oil shock?” and has concluded that oil-price increases are asymmetric in their effects on the U.S. economy. That is, sharp increases in oil prices affect economic activity adversely,...</p>

"This paper develops a framework for inferring common Markov-switching components in a panel data set with large cross-section and time-series dimensions. We apply the framework to studying similarities and differences across U.S. states in the timing of business cycles. We hypothesize that...