One of the most important drawbacks of the existing literature on convergence is that it largely ignores the effect of aggregate fluctuations on the evolution of income disparities. To the extent that regional income disparities follow a distinct cyclical pattern in the short-run, moving either...

This paper aims at the production of a chronology for the EU15 business cycle by comparing parametric and non-parametric procedures on monthly and quarterly data as well in a combined approach. The main innovation is the joint use of the monthly series for the EU15 Gross Domestic Product (GDP)...

The aim of this paper is to identify the different sources of persistence of output fluctuations. We propose an unobserved components model that allows us to decompose GDP series into a trend component and a cyclical component. We let the drift of the trend component to switch between different...