This paper analyses whether and since when East and West German business cycles are synchronised. We investigate real GDP, unemployment rates and survey data as business cycle indicators and employ several empirical methods. Overall, we find that the regional business cycles have synchronised...

The present paper discourses on how European integration and gradual enlargement has affected the synchronicity in business cycles in EU regions. The analysis, which is conducted on annual data at the NUTSII level, is based on the following grounds: First, it examines the degree of synchronicity...

This paper examines the degree of trade integration and business cycle synchronisation between eight Balkan countries and the Euro area over the period 2000:1-2011:4. The main findings are that Slovenia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia exhibit a high level of openness relative to...

We analyze the effect of the geographic expansion of banks across U.S. states on the co-movement of economic activity between states. Exploiting the removal of interstate banking restrictions to construct time-varying instrumental variables at the state-pair level, we find that bilateral banking...

Since the 1990s, the issue of regional income convergence and its long term tendencies has been thoroughly and heatedly discussed. Much less attention, however, has been devoted to the short-run dynamics of regional convergence. In particular, three important aspects have not yet been adequately...

This paper proposes a multi-level dynamic factor model to identify common components in output gap estimates. We pool multiple output gap estimates for 157 countries and decompose them into one global, eight regional, and 157 country-specific cycles. Our approach easily deals with mixed...