Factor based forecasting has been at the forefront of developments in the macroeconometric forecasting literature in the recent past. Despite the flurry of activity in the area, a number of specification issues such as the choice of the number of factors in the forecasting regression, the...

We nowcast world trade using machine learning, distinguishing between tree-based methods (random forest, gradient boosting) and their regression-based counterparts (macroeconomic random forest, linear gradient boosting). While much less used in the literature, the latter are found to outperform...

This paper investigates whether information from foreign yield curves helps forecast domestic yield curves out-of-sample. A nested methodology to forecast yield curves in domestic and international settings is applied on three major countries (the US, Germany and the UK). This novel methodology...

In this paper we propose a methodology to estimate a dynamic factor model on data sets with an arbitrary pattern of missing data. We modify the Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithm as proposed for a dynamic factor model by Watson and Engle (1983) to the case with general pattern of missing...

This paper compares the predictive ability of the factor models of Stock and Watson (2002) and Forni, Hallin, Lippi, and Reichlin (2005) using a "large" panel of US macroeconomic variables. We propose a nesting procedure of comparison that clarifies and partially overturns the results of similar...

We propose a new method for multivariate forecasting which combines Dynamic Factor and multivariate GARCH models. The information contained in large datasets is captured by few dynamic common factors, which we assume being conditionally heteroskedastic. After presenting the model, we propose a...

This paper proposes an econometric framework for nowcasting the monetary policy stance and decisions of the European Central Bank (ECB) exploiting the ow of conventional and textual data that become available between two consecutive press conferences. Decompositions of the updated nowcasts into...