Filters used to estimate unobserved components in time series are often designed on a priori grounds, so as to capture the frequencies associated with the component. A limitation of these filters is that they may yield spurious results. The danger can be avoided if the so called ARIMA model...

We show that an extension of the Markov-switching dynamic factor models that accounts for the specificities of the day to day monitoring of economic developments such as ragged edges, mixed frequencies and data revisions is a good tool to forecast the Euro area recessions in real time. We...

We develop a dynamic factor model to compute short term forecasts of the Spanish GDP growth in real time. With this model, we compute a business cycle index which works well as an indicator of the business cycle conditions in Spain. To examine its real time forecasting accuracy, we use real-time...