There have been increasing warnings lately that the world economy is in danger of disintegrating. How realistic are such fears? Could the world's trading partners have a serious interest in such a development and be prepared to accept the risks involved? The following three articles seek to...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to 2011q4. Our empirical findings...

This paper merges two specifications recently developed in the forecasting literature: the MS-MIDAS model (Guérin and Marcellino, 2013) and the factor-MIDAS model (Marcellino and Schumacher, 2010). The MS-factor MIDAS model that we introduce incorporates the information provided by a large data...

In recent years, factor models have received increasing attention from both econometricians and practitioners in the forecasting of macroeconomic variables. In this context, Bai and Ng (2008) find an improvement in selecting indicators according to the forecast variable prior to factor...

The aim of this paper is the identification of structural shocks which affect the dynamics of sectoral inventories, through an analysis of the forecasting error variance decomposition. This identification is achieved using the American and French time series of aggregate production, sectoral...

This paper develops new bridge models to forecast the quarterly GDP growth in France in the short run. We only use data from business survey in the French industry, services and construction. Two alternative methods are considered. The first one relies on the GETS algorithm applied to blocks of...

The recent observed decline of business cycle variability suggests that broad macroeconomic risk may have fallen as well. This may in turn have some impact on equity risk premia. We investigate the latent structures in the volatilities of the business cycle and stock market valuations by...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Community opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing. A threshold autoregression allowing for a transitory strong recovery phasis is estimated for French, German and European...

In recent years, factor models have received increasing interest from central banks and international organizations to forecast macroeconomic variables. We examine the performance of these models in forecasting the French GDP growth rate over short horizons. The factors are extracted from a...

In recent years, central banks and international organisations have been making ever greater use of factor models to forecast macroeconomic variables. We examine the performance of these models in forecasting French GDP growth over short horizons. The factors are extracted from a large data set...