The present work applies several advanced spectral methods to the analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations in three countries of the European Union: Italy, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. We focus here in particular on singular-spectrum analysis (SSA), which provides valuable spatial and...

This paper proposes a regularisation method for the estimation of large covariance matrices that uses insights from the multiple testing (MT) literature. The approach tests the statistical significance of individual pair-wise correlations and sets to zero those elements that are not...

Unemployment, firm Dynamics, and the Business CyclTime variation is a fundamental problem in statistical and econometric analysis of macroeconomic and financial data. Recently there has been considerable focus on developing econometric modelling that enables stochastic structural change in model...

The headline consumer price index (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This paper...

This paper describes a dynamic factor model for the Maltese economy. The model mainly serves as a tool to timely provide the Central Bank of Malta with nowcasts as well as short-term forecasts of the growth rate of the real gross domestic product, which in turn are used as an input in the...

We show that the contemporaneous and longer horizon impulse responses estimated using small-scale Proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) can be severely biased in the presence of information insufficiency. Instead, we recommend the use of a Proxy Factor Augmented VAR (FAVAR) model that...