This paper evaluates the consequences of the financial and sovereign debt crises on the evolution of the business cycle synchronization across all the Euro Area members. We take advantage of the dimension reduction properties of dynamic factor models to summarize a large dataset of macroeconomic indicators for the Euro Area countries. Then, we estimate latent state variables based on Markov-switching methodologies to obtain a time-varying measure of business cycle synchronization. The combination of these two techniques allows us to describe the evolution in the degree of coincidence of the business cycle phases along time for this set of countries. Our results suggest that there was a general decline in the degree of business cycle synchronization across the Euro Area countries following the financial and the sovereign debt crises. Although they have recovered the levels of business cycle synchronization exhibited before these events, there are significant differences across countries in the required time to recover those levels.

中文翻译：

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欧洲经济周期同步中的两速

本文评估了金融危机和主权债务危机对整个欧元区成员国经济周期同步发展的影响。我们利用动态因子模型的降维特性，总结了欧元区国家宏观经济指标的大型数据集。然后，我们基于马尔可夫切换方法估计潜在状态变量，以获得商业周期同步的时变度量。这两种技术的结合使我们能够描述这组国家商业周期阶段的重合度随时间的演变。我们的结果表明，在金融和主权债务危机之后，整个欧元区国家的商业周期同步化程度普遍下降。