This paper reviews some of the applications that use the vast swathes of information provided by Internet user searches for economic analysis and forecasting. This enormous volume of information, available in real time, can be handled by analysts thanks to statistical tools such as “Google...

In the analysis of time series, it is frequent to classify perturbations as Additive Outliers (AO), Innovative Outliers (IO), Level Shift (LS) outliers or Transitory Change (TC) outliers. In this paper, a new outlier type, the Seasonal Level Shift (SLS), is introduced in order to complete the...

The paper deals with estimation of missing observations in possibly nonstationary ARIMA models. First, the model is assumed known, and the structure of the interpolation filter is analysed. Using the inverse or dual autocorrelation function it is seen how estimation of a missing observation is...

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...

This paper proposes a parsimonious approach to test non-linear dependence on the conditional mean and variance of hedge funds with respect to several market factors. My approach introduces non-linear dependence by means of empirically relevant polynomial functions of the factors. For comparison...

The paper deals with the statistical treatment of macroeconomic data for short-run economic analysis, monitoring and control. The main applications are short-term forecasting and unobserved components estimation, including trend and cycle estimation, and, most often, seasonal adjustment. The...

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:...

The Quarterly Model of Banco de España (MTBE, Modelo Trimestral del Banco de España) is a large-scale macro-econometric model used for medium term macroeconomic forecasting of the Spanish economy, as well as for evaluating the staff projections and performing scenario simulations. The model is...

We analyse the likely effects of changes in the monetary and financial regimes of EMU countries on the dynamics of output and inflation. In particular, we evaluate the impact of the regime shift on the forecasting performance of reduced-form models. Data for both the pre-EMU and the EMU regimes...