This article presents basic tools for measuring different business lines' contributions to the U.S. economy's business cycles, and it applies these to measure the exposure of a large conglomerate to macroeconomic risks

During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....