International business cycles and oil market dynamics

Abstract

This dissertation is about understanding business cycle fluctuations in an international perspective. What causes them, and how do they transmit across borders? In essence the motivation for the dissertation can be summarized with two words, globalization and regionalism.

The dissertation presents a series of four papers. Three common features are representative for these papers: They are all empirical investigations of, in general international and in particular domestic, business cycle fluctuations. The methodological framework used for inference utilizes large data sets, combining both the time and cross sectional dimension of the information set available. Lastly, all the papers build on the findings in the business cycle literature of a high degree of cross country synchronization, but extend this line of research by identifying common shocks.

A prime candidate for a shock that is truly common across borders is unexpected disturbances to the price of oil. Two of the papers in the dissertation explicitly explore the linkages between the global oil market and the macro economy. Furthermore, just as individual countries are highly interconnected so are likely also the sectors of a given economy. Thus, to fully understand how international shocks like, e.g., unexpected innovations in the real price of oil, transmit to domestic economies, production networks, trade between sectors and potentially shared productivity dynamics between the different sectors in the economy might all be important. The last paper in this dissertation addresses this issue.