The estimation of large Vector Autoregressions with stochastic volatility using standard methods is computationally very demanding. In this paper we propose to model conditional volatilities as driven by a single common unobserved factor. This is justified by the observation that the pattern of...

The paper addresses the issue of forecasting a large set of variables using multivariate models. In particular, we propose three alternative reduced rank forecasting models and compare their predictive performance for US time series with the most promising existing alternatives, namely, factor...

We show how the use of panel data methods such as those proposed in single equations by Kao and Pedroni or in systems by Larsson and Lyhagen to investigate economic hypotheses such as purchading power pariety or the term structure of interest rates may be affected by the existence of cross-unit...

This paper analyses two features of concern to policy-makers in the countries of the prospective European Monetary Union: The solvency of their governments finances; and the accuracy of fiscal forecasts.

We analyse the relative performance of the IMF, OECD and EC in forecasting the government deficit, as a ratio to GDP, for the G7 countries. Interesting differences across countries emerge, sometimes supporting the hypothesis of an asymmetric loss function (i.e. of a preferrence for...

Models based on economic theory have serious problems at forecasting exchange rates better than simple univariate driftless random walk models, especially at short horizons. Multivariate time series models suffer from the same problem. In this paper, we propose to forecast exchange rates with a...

We propose a new approach to forecasting the term structure of interest rates, which allows to efficiently extract the information contained in a large panel of yields. In particular, we use a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) with an optimal amount of shrinkage towards univariate AR...

We suggest a simple non model based procedure to recover a time series from its temporally aggregated realizations. If additional assumptions on the under lying process are intorduced, it is shown that the procedure is related to many of the former proposals in the literature. It can also be...

In this paper we propose a monthly measure for the euro area Gross Domestic Product (GDP) based on a small scale factor model for mixed frequency data, featuring two factors: the first is driven by hard data, whereas the second captures the contribution of survey variables as coincident...