According to a growing body of empirical literature, global shocks have become less important for business cycles in industrialized countries and emerging market economies since the mid-1980s. In this paper, we analyze the question of what might have caused a decoupling from the global business...

In this paper we analyze European business cycles before and under EMU. Across the two periods we find 1) a significant decline in real exchange rate volatility, 2) significant changes in cross-country correlations, and 3) the volatility of macroeconomic fundamentals largely unchanged. We...