Unobserved components time series models decompose a time series into a trend, a season, a cycle, an irregular disturbance, and possibly other components. These models have been successfully applied to many economic time series. The standard assumption of a linear model, often appropriate after...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

This paper concerns estimating parameters in a high-dimensional dynamic factormodel by the method of maximum likelihood. To accommodate missing data in theanalysis, we propose a new model representation for the dynamic factor model. Itallows the Kalman filter and related smoothing methods to...

We determine the magnitude and nature of systematic default risk using 1971{2009) default data from Moody's. We disentangle systematic risk factors due to business cycle effects, common default dynamics (frailty), and industry-specific dynamics (including contagion). To quantify the contribution...

Many seasonal macroeconomic time series are subject to changes in their means and variances over a long time horizon. In this paper we propose a general treatment for the modelling of time-varying features in economic time series. We show that time series models with mean and variance functions...

The basic structural time series model has been designed for the modelling and forecasting of seasonal economic time series. In this paper we explore a generalisation of the basic structural time series model in which the time-varying trigonometric terms associated with different seasonal...

We propose a new class of observation-driven time-varying parameter models for dynamic volatilities and correlations to handle time series from heavy-tailed distributions. The model adopts generalized autoregressive score dynamics to obtain a time-varying covariance matrix of the multivariate...

In this paper we present an exact maximum likelihood treatment forthe estimation of a Stochastic Volatility in Mean(SVM) model based on Monte Carlo simulation methods. The SVM modelincorporates the unobserved volatility as anexplanatory variable in the mean equation. The same extension...

In this paper we compare the predictive abilility of Stochastic Volatility (SV)models to that of volatility forecasts implied by option prices. We develop anSV model with implied volatility as an exogeneous var able in the varianceequation which facilitates the use of statistical tests for...