This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics</I> (2008). Vol. 70 issue 1, pages 23-51.<P> This paper investigates business cycle relations among different economies in theEuro area. Cyclical dynamics are explicitly modelled as part of a time series...</p></i>

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

This discussion paper led to a publication in the <I>Journal of Applied Econometrics</A>. Vol. 19, issue 5, pages 611-636.<P> Convergence in gross domestic product series of five European countriesis empirically identified using multivariate time series models that arebased on unobserved components with...</p></i>

This discussion paper led to an article in the <I>Journal of Time Series Analysis</I> (2010). Vol. 31, pages 407-414.<P> State space models with nonstationary processes and fixed regression effects require a state vector with diffuse initial conditions. Different likelihood functions can be adopted for...</p></i>

The multivariate analysis of a panel of economic and financial time series with mixed frequencies is a challenging problem. The standard solution is to analyze the mix of monthly and quarterly time series jointly by means of a multivariate dynamic model with a monthly time index: artificial...

This paper studies vector autoregressive models with parsimoniously time-varying parameters. The parameters are assumed to follow parsimonious random walks, where parsimony stems from the assumption that increments to the parameters have a non-zero probability of being exactly equal to zero. We...

We introduce a Combined Density Nowcasting (CDN) approach to Dynamic Factor Models (DFM) that in a coherent way accounts for time-varying uncertainty of several model and data features in order to provide more accurate and complete density nowcasts. The combination weights are latent random...

In this paper we consider the Fractional Vector Error Correction model proposed in Avarucci (2007), which is characterized by a richer lag structure than models proposed in Granger (1986) and Johansen (2008, 2009). We discuss the identification issues of the model of Avarucci (2007), following...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167947304001562">'Computational Statistics & Data Analysis'</A>, 49(2), 417-44.<P>We examine the asymptotic efficiency of OLS and IV estimators in a simple dynamic structural model with a constant and two explanatory variables: the lagged dependent variable and an...</p></a>