This paper sets out a comprehensive framework to identify regional business cycles within Spain and analyses their stylised features and the degree of synchronisation both within them and between them and the Spanish economy. We show that the regional cycles are quite heterogeneous although they display some degree of synchronisation. We also propose a dynamic factor model to cluster the regional comovements. We find that the Spanish business cycle is not the same as those of the 17 regions, but is the sum of the different regional behaviours. Clusters with a high industrial weight, per capita income and human capital and a low unemployment rate are also more synchronized. The implications derived from our results are useful both for policy makers and analysts.

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We acknowledge the useful comments of an anonymous referee. We are also indebted to Pierre Perron and Zhongjun Qu, for their helpful suggestions. Financial support from Spanish Government CICYT projects ECO2008-03040 and ECO2009-13085 is recognised. The usual disclaimer applies.

We propose a set of new quantitative measures to characterise more fully the features of economic recoveries. We apply these measures to post-war US expansions and use cluster analysis to determine that there are two different types of recoveries in recent US economic history, with most expansions before 1984 (Great Moderation) looking quite different from those after.

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