We study the relation between the credit cycle and macro-economic fundamentals in an intensity-based framework. Using rating transition and default data of U.S. corporates from Standard and Poor’s over the period 1980-2005 we directly estimate the credit cycle from the micro rating data. We...

We analyze the role of industrial and non-industrial production sectors in the US economy by adopting a novel multilevel factor model. The proposed model is suitable for high-dimensional panels of economic time series and allows for interdependence structures across multiple sectors. The...

This paper introduces a novel simulation-based filtering method for general state space models. It allows for the computation of time-varying conditional means, quantiles, and modes, but also for the prediction of latent variables in general. The method relies on generating artificial samples of...

To investigate the role of intra-regional trade integration on economic growth in Latin America, we develop a multilevel spatial production network model with time-varying parameters. The theoretical model is established for a multi-country and multi-sectoral economy. The reduced-form...

We propose a multiplicative dynamic factor structure for the conditional modelling of the variances of an N-dimensional vector of financial returns. We identify common and idiosyncratic conditional volatility factors. The econometric framework is based on an observation-driven time series model...

Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...

Multimodal empirical distributions arise in many fields like Astrophysics, Bioinformatics, Climatology and Economics due to the heterogeneity of the underlying populations. Mixture processes are a popular tool for accurate approximation of such distributions and implied mode detection. Using...