Using a panel of 21 OECD countries and 40 years of annual data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have business cycles that fluctuate more closely. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP)...

We decompose the correlation between relative consumption and the real exchange rate into its dynamic components at different frequencies. Using multivariate spectral analysis techniques we show that, at odds with a high degree of risk-sharing, in most OECD countries the dynamic correlation...