The paper details an application of programs TRAMO and SEATS to seasonal adjustment and trend-cycle estimation. The series considered is the German Retail Trade Turnover series, for which, when adjusting with X12-ARIMA, the Bundesbank had identified two problems. One had to do with...

Modern DSGE models are microfounded and have deep parameters that should be invariant to changes in economic policy, so in principle they are not subject to the Lucas critique. But the literature has already established that misspecification issues also cause parameter instability after policy...

This paper investigates the identification and dating of the European business cycle, using different methods. We concentrate on methods and statistical series that provides timely and accurate information about the contemporaneous state of the economy in order to provide the reader with a...

The paper contains some implications for applied econometric research. Two important ones are, first, that invertible models, such as AR or VAR models, cannot in general be used to model seasonally adjusted or detrended data. The second one is that to look at the business cycle in detrended...

Present practice in applied time series work, mostly at economic policy or data producing agencies, relies heavily on using moving average filters to estimate unobserved components in time series, such as the seasonally adjusted series, the trend, or the cycle. The purpose of the present paper...

Do public sector wages exert presures on private sector wages, or has private sector a leadership role in wage setting?. This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants of wages (prices, productivity,...

There is a stark contrast between the recent evolution of labor productivity (and TFP) in the US and EU countries. In the US it accelerated around the mid-1990s and there is evidence of reversion to a high-growth regime. In some EU countries, while employment-population ratios started to rise...

During the last crisis, developed economies’ sovereign Credit Default Swap (hereafter CDS) premia have gained in importance as a tool for approximating credit risk. In this paper, we fit a dynamic factor model to decompose the sovereign CDS spreads of ten OECD economies into three components:...

For reasons of empirical tractability, analysis of cointegrated economic time series is often developed in a partial setting, in which a subset of variables is explictly modeled conditional on the rest. This approach yields valid inference only if the conditioning variables are weakly exogenous...

Realized volatilities, when observed over time, share the following stylised facts: comovements, clustering, long-memory, dynamic volatility, skewness and heavy-tails. We propose a dynamic factor model that captures these stylised facts and that can be applied to vast panels of volatilities as...