Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is an important tool in data analyses, particularly in social science. Usually four steps are carried out which contain a large number of options. One important option is the number of factors and the association of variables with a factor. Our tools aim to...

In this study we forecast the term structure of FIBOR/EURIBOR swap rates by means of recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. In advance, a principal components analysis (PCA) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure. To evaluate ex–ante forecasting performance for...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection crite- rion measures economic ex–ante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection bias nor to the risk of...