We propose a multicountry quantile factor augmeneted vector autoregression (QFAVAR) to model heterogeneities both across countries and across characteristics of the distributions of macroeconomic time series. The presence of quantile factors allows for summarizing these two heterogeneities in a...

The literature on international business cycles has employed dynamic factor models to disentangle global from group-specific and national factors in countries' macroeconomic aggregates. Therefore, the countries have simply been classified ex ante as belonging to the same region or the same level...

We rely on a hierarchical volatility factor approach to estimate and decompose time-varying second moments of countries output growth into global, regional and idiosyncratic contributions. We document a “global moderation” of international business cycles, defined as a persistent decline in...

In order to identify structural shocks that affect economic variables, restrictions need to be imposed on the parameters of structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models. Economic theory is the primary source of such restrictions. However, only over-identifying restrictions can be tested with...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

To investigate how economies, financial markets or institutions can deal with stress, we nowadays often analyze the effects of shocks conditional on a recession or a bear market. MSVAR models are ideally suited for such analyses because they combine gradual movement with sudden switches. In this...

With strong historical ties, and economic linkages that have continued to grow after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Baltic and Nordic regions form a unique economic space. How interconnected are these regions, both to each other and to the rest of the world? Greater connections can help...

We analyse the cross-country dimension of financial cycles by studying cyclical co-movements in credit, house prices, equity prices and interest rates across the G7 economies. We use wavelet-based statistics to assess at which frequencies cyclical fluctuations and their crosscountry co-movements...