Financial Integration and Business Cycle Synchronization

We analyze the effect of financial integration on the degree of business cycle synchronization, using a confidential dataset on banks' international bilateral exposure over the past three decades in a panel of twenty developed countries. Financial integration is associated with less synchronized output cycles, in line with the standard theories of output fluctuations. We employ two distinct instrumental variable specifications to identify the one-way effect of integration on synchronization. These specifications reveal that the component of banking integration predicted by legislative-regulatory harmonization policies and the nature of the bilateral exchange rate regime has a negative effect on output synchronization. Our results contrast with those of the cross-sectional studies that show an increase in the degree of business cycles synchronization as a result of financial integration. We reconcile the different results by showing that the cross-sectional estimates suffer from omitted-variable bias.

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This paper was revised on May 26, 2009

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