We study the dynamics of a Lucas-tree model with finitely lived agents who “learn from experience.” Individuals update expectations by Bayesian learning based on observations from their own lifetimes. In this model, the stock price exhibits stochastic boom-and-bust fluctuations around the...

By how much do employed households reduce their consumption when the aggregate unemployment rate rises? In Spain during the Great Recession a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate was related to a strong drop in household consumption of more than 0.7% per equivalent adult. This...

We study three different exchange rate regimes in a stochastic OLG model with free capital mobility and incomplete markets. The regimes are characterized by the type of coordinated seignorage financed transfer (or fiscal) policy in place. We are especially interested in how the different types...

We extend the Markov-switching dynamic factor model to account for some of the specificities of the day-to-day monitoring of economic developments from macroeconomic indicators, such as ragged edges and mixed frequencies. We examine the theoretical benefits of this extension and corroborate the...

We examine the short-term performance of two alternative approaches to forecasting using dynamic factor models. The first approach extracts the seasonal component of the individual indicators before estimating the dynamic factor model, while the alternative uses the nonseasonally adjusted data...

We propose a Markov-switching dynamic factor model to construct an index of global business cycle conditions, for performing short-term forecasts of quarterly world GDP growth in real time and computing real-time business cycle probabilities. To overcome the real-time forecasting challenges, the...

The recent economic crisis has altered the dynamics of economic series and, as a consequence, introduced uncertainty in seasonal adjustment of recent years. This problem was discussed in recent workshops at the European Central Bank and at Eurostat in the context of adjustment of the Euro Area...

We examine the finite-sample performance of small versus large scale dynamic factor models. Our Monte Carlo analysis reveals that small scale factor models out-perform large scale models in factor estimation and forecasting for high levels of cross-correlation across the idiosyncratic errors of...

In this paper we propose a new real-time forecasting model for euro area GDP growth, D€STINY, which attempts to bridge the existing gap in the literature between large- and small-scale dynamic factor models. By adopting a disaggregated modelling approach, D€STINY uses most of the information...