In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

We propose a quantification of the p-p plot that assigns equal weight to all distances between the respective distributions: the surface between the p-p plot and the diagonal. This surface is labelled the Harmonic Weighted Mass (HWM) index. We introduce the diagonal-deviation (d-d) plot that...

This paper concerns estimating parameters in a high-dimensional dynamic factormodel by the method of maximum likelihood. To accommodate missing data in theanalysis, we propose a new model representation for the dynamic factor model. Itallows the Kalman filter and related smoothing methods to...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has become an established approach for analyzing and comparing efficiency results of corporate organizations or economic agents. It has also found wide application in comparative studies on airport efficiency. The standard DEA approach to comparative airport...

We determine the magnitude and nature of systematic default risk using 1971{2009) default data from Moody's. We disentangle systematic risk factors due to business cycle effects, common default dynamics (frailty), and industry-specific dynamics (including contagion). To quantify the contribution...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

Many seasonal macroeconomic time series are subject to changes in their means and variances over a long time horizon. In this paper we propose a general treatment for the modelling of time-varying features in economic time series. We show that time series models with mean and variance functions...

The basic structural time series model has been designed for the modelling and forecasting of seasonal economic time series. In this paper we explore a generalisation of the basic structural time series model in which the time-varying trigonometric terms associated with different seasonal...

We propose a new class of observation-driven time-varying parameter models for dynamic volatilities and correlations to handle time series from heavy-tailed distributions. The model adopts generalized autoregressive score dynamics to obtain a time-varying covariance matrix of the multivariate...

P-p plots contain all the information that is needed for scale-invariant comparisons. Indeed, Empirical Distribution Function (EDF) tests translate sample p-p plots into a single number. In this paper we characterize the set of all distinct p-p plots for two balanced sample of size n absent...