Some Stylized Facts About the Euro Area Business Cycle

Abstract

This paper presents stylised facts about the business cycle of the Euro area economy, using the US economy and national economies within the Euro area as benchmarks. The magnitude and the timing of the Euro area fluctuations in consumption, investment, prices, inflation, interest rate, monetary aggregates relative to the fluctuations of GDP are very similar to the one observe in the US while they differ from the ones of the individual countries participating to EMU. These results are robust to different aggregation method chosen to build Euro area aggregates and to different filtering methods of macroeconomic time series.

Keywords: Euro area, business cycle, monetary policy

JEL Classification: E42, E50