The two-speed Europe in business cycle synchronization

©2020. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form inEmpirical Economics. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-019-01730-4This paper evaluates the consequences of the financial and sovereign debt crises on the evolution of the business cycle synchronization among all the Euro Area members. Combining dynamic factor models with Markov-switching methodologies, we find that the Euro Area countries have recovered the level of business cycle synchronization exhibited before the Great Recession. However, we detect significant differences across countries in the required time to recover those levels