In the context of latent factor models that are widely used in economics, a common assumption made is one of factor pervasiveness, which implies that all available predictor or informative variables in a dataset, with the possible exception of a negligible number of them, load significantly on...

Many recent modelling advances in finance topics ranging from the pricing of volatility-based derivative products to asset management are predicated on the importance of jumps, or discontinuous movements in asset returns. In light of this, a number of recent papers have addressed volatility...

In this paper, we use factor-augmented HAR-type models to predict the daily integrated volatility of asset returns. Our approach is based on a proposed two-step dimension reduction procedure designed to extract latent common volatility factors from a large dimensional and high-frequency returns...

A number of recent studies in the economics literature have focused on the usefulness of factor models in the context of prediction using "big data". In this paper, our over-arching question is whether such "big data" are useful for modelling low frequency macroeconomic variables such as...

In this paper, we provide new empirical evidence of the relative usefulness of interval (density) and point forecasts of asset-return volatility, in the context of financial risk management using high frequency data. In our evaluation we use both statistical criteria (i.e., accuracy of...

In this paper, we contribute to the nascent literature on nowcasting and forecasting GDP in emerging market economies using big data methods. This is done by analyzing the usefulness of various dimension reduction, machine learning and shrinkage methods including sparse principal component...

We utilize mixed frequency factor-MIDAS models for the purpose of carrying out pastcasting, nowcasting, and forecasting experiments using real-time data. We also introduce a new real-time Korean GDP dataset, which is the focus of our experiments. The methodology that we utilize involves first...

In this paper, we empirically assess the extent to which early release inefficiency and definitional change affect prediction precision. In particular, we carry out a series of ex-ante prediction experiments in order to examine: the marginal predictive content of the revision process, the...