This paper examines the propensity of firms to comove in investment decisions. Although stock return comovement and herding among investors received considerable attention in existing work, little is known about correlated investment behavior of firms. After controlling for the similarity of...

The transmission mechanisms of volatility between markets can be characterized within a new Markov Switching bivariate model where the state of one variable feeds into the transition probability of the state of the other. A number of model restrictions and hypotheses can be tested to stress the...

1971-2009. Financial shocks are defined as unexpected changes of a financial conditions index (FCI), recently developed by Hatzius et al. (2010), for the US. We use a time-varying factor-augmented VAR to model the FCI jointly with a large set of macroeconomic, financial and trade variables for...

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the transmission of international business cycles. I document for the G7 countries between 1991 and 2006 that increases in bilateral FDI linkages are associated with more synchronized investment cycles. I also find that the...