This paper compares different ways to estimate the current state of the economy using factor models that can handle unbalanced datasets. Due to the different release lags of business cycle indicators, data unbalancedness often emerges at the end of multivariate samples, which is sometimes...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks’...

Recent developments on international financial markets have called the benefits of bank globalization into question. Large, internationally active banks have acquired substantial market power, and international activities have not necessarily made banks less risky. Yet, surprisingly little is...

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...

Does more FDI make the world a riskier place for workers? We analyze whether an increase in multinational firms' activities is associated with an increase in firm-level employment volatility. We use a firm-level dataset for Germany which allows us to distinguish between purely domestic firms,...

This paper studies the sectoral and geographical dimensions of the response of bank lending to sectoral growth. We use several bank-level datasets provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank for the 1996-2002 period. Our results show that bank heterogeneity affects how lending responds to domestic...

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...

From a theoretical point of view, greater trade openness affects firm-level volatility by changing the exposure and the reaction of firms to macroeconomic shocks. The net effect is ambiguous, though. This paper provides firm-level evidence on the link between openness and volatility. Using two...