This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...

This study examines differences in the interest rate response to an ECB policy impulse in the euro area, the new EU-member states, and in the other non-eurozone EU countries in order to gauge the degree of interest rate alignment in Europe. To this end, PANIC, a Panel Analysis of...

This paper discusses the forecasting performance of alternative factor models based on a large panel of quarterly time series for the german economy. One model extracts factors by static principals components analysis, the other is based on dynamic principal components obtained using frequency...

We look at how large international datasets can improve forecasts of national activity. We use the case of New Zealand, an archetypal small open economy. We apply "data-rich" factor and shrinkage methods to tackle the problem of efficiently handling hundreds of predictor data series from many...

This paper surveys existing factor forecast applications for real economic activity and inflation by means of a meta-analysis and contributes to the current debate on the determinants of the forecast performance of large-scale dynamic factor models relative to other models. We find that, on...

This paper discusses a factor model for estimating monthly GDP using a large number of monthly and quarterly time series in real-time. To take into account the different periodicities of the data and missing observations at the end of the sample, the factors are estimated by applying an EM...

In this paper, we put DSGE forecasts in competition with factor forecasts. We focus on these two models since they represent nicely the two opposing forecasting philosophies. The DSGE model on the one hand has a strong theoretical economic background; the factor model on the other hand is mainly...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

We examine the global dimension of inflation in 24 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007 in a traditional Phillips curve framework. We decompose output gaps and changes in unit labor costs into common (or global) and idiosyncratic components using a factor analysis and introduce these components...

This paper considers factor forecasting with national versus factor forecasting withinternational data. We forecast German GDP based on a large set of about 500 time series, consisting of German data as well as data from Euro-area and G7 countries. For factor estimation, we consider standard...