An important issue in the analysis of cross-sectional dependence which has received renewed interest in the past few years is the need for a better understanding of the extent and nature of such cross dependencies. In this paper we focus on measures of cross-sectional dependence and how such...

Testing the rank of a matrix of estimated parameters is key in a large variety of econometric modelling scenarios. This paper describes general methods to test for the rank of a matrix, and provides details on a variety of modelling scenarios in the econometrics literature where these tests are...

In this paper we compared the performance of country specific and regional indicators of reserve adequacy in predicting, out of sample, the balance of payment crisis affecting the South East Asian region during the 1997-98 period. A Dynamic Factor method was used to retrieve reserve adequacy...

Identification in the context of multivariate state space modelling involves the specification of the dimension of the state vector. One identification approach requires an estimate of the rank of a Hankel matrix. The most frequently used approaches of rank determination rely on information...

We provide a new method for jointly consistently estimating common trends and cycles in unit root nonstationary multivariate systems. We concentrate on the MA representation of the differenced data and we jointly impose the reduced rank restriction for the common cycles and the common trends on...

In this paper we compare the performance of a regional indicator of vulnerability in predicting, out of sample, the crisis events affecting the South East Asian region during the 1997-98 period. A Dynamic Factor method was used to retrieve the vulnerability indicator and stochastic simulation is...

In this paper we provide tests for the unit root hypothesis against the occurence of an unspecified number of breaks which may be larger than 2 but smaller that the maximum allowed number of breaks, <i>m</i>, in univariate time series models. The advocated procedure is considerably less computationally...

Testing serial dependence is central to much of time series econometrics. A number of tests that have been developed and used to explore the dependence properties of various processes. This paper builds on recent work on nonparametric tests of independence. We consider a fact that characterises...

The estimation of dynamic factor models for large sets of variables has attracted considerable attention recently, due to the increased availability of large datasets. In this paper we propose a new methodology for estimating factors from large datasets based on state space models, discuss its...

Over time, economic statistics are refined. This means that newer data is typically less well measured than old data. Time variation in measurement error like this influences how forecasts should be made. We show how modelling the behaviour of the statistics agency generates both an estimate of...