This paper first reviews a number of stylised facts concerning OECD country business cycles over the past four decades. In general, the amplitude of business cycles has fallen, driven mainly by declining fluctuations of domestic demand. As a result, international divergencies of cyclical...

This chapter is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation...

While the 2008-2009 fi nancial crisis originated in the United States, we witnessed steep declines in output, consumption and investment of similar magnitudes around the globe. This raises two questions. First, given the observed strong home bias in goods and fi nancial markets, what can account...

Growth fluctuations exhibit substantial synchronization across countries, which has been viewed as reflecting a global business cycle driven by shocks with worldwide reach, or spillovers resulting from local real and/or financial linkages between countries. This paper brings these two...

The book provides a thorough and sophisticated descriptive analysis of business cycles in a historical perspective. The study is based on the latest available time series as well as latest techniques from the frequency domain. A combined univariate and bivariate analysis is conducted on the...

The analysis of business cycle synchronization levels has become a key point in the discussion of the processes of international economic integration. Economists show a particular interest in analyzing the frequency of processes of business cycle convergence and divergence (decoupling) in the...