One of the most extended empirical stylized facts about output dynamics in the United States is the positive autocorrelation of output growth. This paper shows that the positive autocorrelation can be better captured by shifts between business cycle states rather than by the standard view of...

We propose a comprehensive methodology to characterize the business cycle comovements across European economies and some industrialized countries, always trying to ‘let the data speak’. Out of this framework, we propose a novel method to show that there is no ‘Euro economy’ that acts as...

We set out a model to compute short-term forecasts of the euro area GDP growth in real-time. To allow for forecast evaluation, we construct a real-time data set that changes for each vintage date and includes the exact information that was available at the time of each forecast. With this data...

We develop a twofold analysis of how the information provided by several economic indicators can be used in Markov-switching dynamic factor models to identify the business cycle turning points. First, we compare the performance of a fully non- linear multivariate specification (one-step...

We examine the short-term performance of two alternative approaches of forecasting from 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 non seasonally adjusted data...

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...

The collapse of the global economy in 2008, following the outbreak of the financial crisis, and the ensuing economic developments of the so-called Great Recession (GR) led many economists to suggest that the Great Moderation (GM) had, indeed, come to an end. This paper offers evidence that the...

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...

To perform real-time business cycle inferences and forecasts of GDP growth rates in the Euro area, we use 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...

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we illustrate this failure by...