We investigate the presence of international business cycles in macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, investment) using a panel of 60 countries over the period 1961-2014. The paper presents a Bayesian stochastic factor selection approach for dynamic factor models with predetermined...

Recessions and expansions are often caused or reinforced by developments in private consumption - the largest component of aggregate demand - which, as a result, varies over the business cycle. As such, an accurate measurement of the cyclical component of consumption and an understanding of its...

We consider which labor market variables are the most informative for estimating and now-casting the U.S. output gap using a multivariate trend-cycle decomposition. Although the unemployment rate clearly contains important cyclical information, it also appears to reflect more persistent...

We study how financial factors shape and interact with the U.S. business cycle through a unified empirical approach where we jointly estimate financial and business cycles as well as identify their underlying drivers using a medium-scale Bayesian Vector Autoregression. First, we show, both in...