Testing the rank of a matrix of estimated parameters is key in a large variety of econometric modelling scenarios. This paper describes general methods to test for the rank of a matrix, and provides details on a variety of modelling scenarios in the econometrics literature where these tests are...

In this paper we compared the performance of country specific and regional indicators of reserve adequacy in predicting, out of sample, the balance of payment crisis affecting the South East Asian region during the 1997-98 period. A Dynamic Factor method was used to retrieve reserve adequacy...

Identification in the context of multivariate state space modelling involves the specification of the dimension of the state vector. One identification approach requires an estimate of the rank of a Hankel matrix. The most frequently used approaches of rank determination rely on information...

We provide a new method for jointly consistently estimating common trends and cycles in unit root nonstationary multivariate systems. We concentrate on the MA representation of the differenced data and we jointly impose the reduced rank restriction for the common cycles and the common trends on...

In this paper we compare the performance of a regional indicator of vulnerability in predicting, out of sample, the crisis events affecting the South East Asian region during the 1997-98 period. A Dynamic Factor method was used to retrieve the vulnerability indicator and stochastic simulation is...

Testing serial dependence is central to much of time series econometrics. A number of tests that have been developed and used to explore the dependence properties of various processes. This paper builds on recent work on nonparametric tests of independence. We consider a fact that characterises...

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 methodology for estimating factors from large datasets based on state space models, discuss its...

Over time, economic statistics are refined. This means that newer data is typically less well measured than old data. Time variation in measurement error like this influences how forecasts should be made. We show how modelling the behaviour of the statistics agency generates both an estimate of...

Recent work in the macroeconometric literature considers the problem of summarising efficiently a large set of variables and using this summary for a variety of purposes including forecasting. This paper applies a new factor extraction method to the extraction of core inflation and forecasting...

This paper proposes a simple direct testing procedure to distinguish a linear unit root process from a globally stationary three-regime self-exciting threshold autoregressive process. We derive the asymptotic null distribution of the Wald statistic, and show that it does not depend on unknown...