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...

I introduce commodities and countries' different commodity trade structures into an otherwise standard two-country model to analyze international business cycles between the U.S. and commodity-exporting countries. In the model, only the foreign country (the commodity-exporting country) produces...

We extract a global factor from cross-country output growth since 1960. We find that the fluctuations of the global factor are typically small, with the annualized unconditional volatility estimated at 0.06%, but highly persistent, with estimated persistence at 0.98. Evidence of time variation...

This paper uses several macroeconomic and financial indicators within a Markov Switching (MS) framework to predict the turning points of the business cycle. The presented model is applied to monthly German real-time data covering the recession and the recovery after the financial crisis. We show...