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...

Measures of economic uncertainty are countercyclical, but economic theory does not provide definite guidance on the direction of causation between uncertainty and the business cycle. This paper proposes a new multi-country approach to the analysis of the interaction between uncertainty and...

Using a factor structural VAR for 14 countries out of the G20 group, we document that output innovations originating outside the G7 account for shares of 10 to almost 25 percent in the business cycle fluctuations of G7 GDP growth. Using auxiliary regressions, we additionally find that these...

We analyze cyclical co-movement in credit, house prices, equity prices, and long-term interest rates across 17 advanced economies. Using a time-varying multi-level dynamic factor model and more than 130 years of data, we analyze the dynamics of co-movement at different levels of aggregation and...

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...