In this paper we focus on cycles and trends of some macroeconomic and housing market variables representative of the French economy. In a first part, we empirically show that cycles in the housing sector, measured by housing prices, housing starts, building permits, sales or residential...

This paper presents a revised version of the model OPTIM, proposed by Irac and Sédillot (2002), used at the Banque de France in order to predict French GDP quarterly growth rate, for the current and next quarters. The model is designed to be used on a monthly basis by integrating monthly...

For few years, the increasing size of available economic and financial databases has led econometricians to develop and adapt new methods in order to efficiently summarize information contained in those large datasets. Among those methods, dynamic factor models have known a rapid development and...

The 2007 sub-prime crisis in the United States, prolonged by a severe economic recession spread over many countries around the world, has led many economic researchers to focus on the recent fluctuations in housing prices and their relationships with macroeconomics and monetary policies. The...

This paper proposes two new coincident probabilistic cyclical indicators developed by the Bank of France in order to follow, on a monthly basis, the French economic activity. The first one is an indicator which aims at detecting the turning points of the acceleration cycle while the second one...