Regional business cycle phases in Spain

© 2019 The Authors.This document 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 published version of a published work that appeared in final form in Studies of Applied Economics.We characterize regional business cycles for Spain using monthly Social Security affiliations. Based on a set of Markov-switching models, we find substantial synchronization of regional business cycles, which has increased since the Great Recession. We do however evidence a regional leading and lagging performance that repeats itself across the different recessions. Typically, earlier signals of national recessions appear in the Islands and Valencia, and are propagated from the periphery to the center. Moreover, north-western regions tend to start the regional recoveries with a significant lag