This Paper uses annual data spanning 1870 to 1930 on a set of variables correlated with business conditions to construct an index of real economic activity in Switzerland. We extract an estimate of the common component of the data series using principal components analysis and the unobservable...

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 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 paper presents a revised version of the DIW Economic Barometer, the business cycle index of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). As in earlier versions, we put forward a factor model on a monthly frequency to filter the latent state of the aggregate economy. In the new...

This paper analyses the use of factor analysis for instrumental variable estimation when the number of instruments tends to infinity. In particular, we focus on situations where many weak instruments exist and/or the factor structure is weak. Theoretical results, simulation experiments and...

This paper shows consistency of a two step estimator of the parameters of a dynamic approximate factor model when the panel of time series is large (n large). In the first step, the parameters are first estimated from an OLS on principal components. In the second step, the factors are estimated...

We present new results for the likelihood-based analysis of the dynamic factor model that possibly includes intercepts and explanatory variables. The latent factors are modelled by stochastic processes. The idiosyncratic disturbances are specified as autoregressive processes with mutually...

This paper develops a method to analyse large cross-sections with non-trivial time dimensions. The method: (i) identifies the number of common shocks in a factor analytic model; (ii) estimates the unobserved common dynamic component; (iii) shows how to test for fundamentality of the common...

Using long time series for sovereign bond markets of fifteen industrialized economies from 1875 to 2009, I find that financial market integration by the end of the 20th century was higher than in earlier periods and exhibited a J-shaped trend with a trough in the 1920s. The main reason for the...

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 parametric methodology for estimating factors from large datasets based on state space models and...