Seit 1990 veröffentlicht das United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) den sogenannten Human Development Index (HDI), mit dem der Entwicklungsstand eines Landes beschrieben und verglichen werden kann. Zur Beschreibung von Entwicklung stützt sich der HDI auf nur wenige Indikatoren. Dem...

It is common to transform data to stationarity, such as by differencing and demeaning, before estimating factor models in macroeconomics. Imposing these transformations, however, limit opportunities to learn about trending behaviour. Trends and deterministic processes can play a central role in...

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. Work in this field has been carried out in a series of recent papers. This paper provides an...

The paradigm of a factor model is very appealing and has been used extensively in economic analyses. Underlying the factor model is the idea that a large number of economic variables can be adequately modelled by a small number of indicator variables. Throughout this extensive research activity...

This paper considers alternative approaches to the analysis of large panel data models in the presence of error cross section dependence. A popular method for modelling such dependence uses a factor error structure. Such models raise new problems for estimation and inference. This paper compares...

This paper revisits a number of data-rich prediction methods, like factor models, Bayesian ridge regression and forecast combinations, which are widely used in macroeconomic forecasting, and compares these with a lesser known alternative method: partial least squares regression. Under the...

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...

Recently, considerable emphasis has been placed on the problems arising out of cross-sectional dependence in panel unit root tests. This paper adopts the factor based cross-sectional dependence paradigm of Bai and Ng (2004) but suggests alternative factor extraction methods. Some theoretical...

The aim of this paper is to consider multivariate stochastic volatility models for large dimensional datasets. We suggest use of the principal component methodology of Stock and Watson (2002) for the stochastic volatility factor model discussed by Harvey, Ruiz, and Shephard (1994). The method is...