Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...

Since early 90s, the issue of income convergence across regions has been widely discussed in a number of papers, both looking at long-term tendencies and trying to establish the role played by several socio-economic determinants. Much less attention has instead been devoted to the analysis of...