This paper assesses the role of financial variables in real economic fluctuations, in view of analysing the link between financial cycles and business cycles at the global level. A Global VAR modelling approach, which has been proved suitable for modelling country or regional linkages, is used...

We assess to which degree an international transfer mechanism can enhance consumption risk sharing as well as allocative efficiency and apply our results to a potential European unemployment benefit scheme (EUBS). Specifically, we first develop a simple model with nominal rigidities to build...

This paper sets out a comprehensive framework to identify regional business cycles within Spain and analyses their stylised features and the degree of synchronization present among them and the Spanish economy. We show that the regional cycles are quite heterogeneous although they display some...

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...

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...

The degree of comovement of economic activity across states or regions is an issue of utmost importance to policymakers. Asymmetric business cycles are often seen as an impediment to the formation of a common currency area. However, it has been argued that a common monetary policy in itself...

This paper analyses the impact of oil both price shocks on the GDP and prices in the Spanish economy and its seventeen NUTS-2 regions. The Qu and Perron (2007) and the Bai and Perron (1998, 2003a and 2003b) methods identify different periods across the sample. Evidence in favour of a diminishing...

This paper puts forward a Bayesian version of the global vector autoregressive model (B-GVAR) that accommodates international linkages across countries in a system of vec-tor autoregressions. We compare the predictive performance of B-GVAR models for the one- and four-quarter ahead forecast...