The first official data releases of quarterly real GDP for the euro area are published about eight weeks after the end of the reference quarters. Meanwhile, ongoing economic developments must be assessed from various, more readily available, monthly indicators. We examine in the context of...

The study uses a bivariate unobserved components model for output and the unemployment rate in order to examine stylised facts of the cyclical behaviour of unemployment and to estimate the size of persistence. The model is applied to the U.S., Canada, and major European economies. Estimates of...

The study proposes a multivariate unobserved components model in order to examine relationships at business cycle frequencies among macroeconomic variables. The series are decomposed into non-stationary trends, stationary cycles, and an irregular component. The co-movements among the particular...

The paper investigates real-time output gap estimates for the euro artea obtained from various unobserved components (UOC) models. Based on a state space modelling framework, three criteria are used to evaluate real-time estimates, I.e. standard errors, unbiasedness and conditional inflation...

We derive forecast weights and uncertainty measures for assessing the role of individual series in a dynamic factor model (DFM) to forecast euro area GDP from monthly indicators. The use of the Kalman filter allows us to deal with publication lags when calculating the above measures. We find...

Global financial integration unlocks a huge potential for international risk sharing. We examine the degree to which international equity holdings act as a risk sharing device in industrial and emerging economies. We split equity returns into investment income (dividend distribution) and capital...

We estimate and forecast growth in euro area monthly GDP and its components from a dynamic factor model due to Doz et al. (2005), which handles unbalanced data sets in an efficient way. We extend the model to integrate interpolation and forecasting together with cross-equation accounting...

I estimate network dependence effects in the euro area unsecured overnight interbank market during the financial crisis. I use linear spatial regressions to estimate the dependence of individual banks?trading volumes (and interest rates) on the trading volumes (and interest rates) of their...

Forecasts from dynamic factor models potentially benefit from refining the data set by eliminating uninformative series. The paper proposes to use prediction weights as provided by the factor model itself for this purpose. Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application to short-term...

We use multivariate unobserved components models to estimate trend and cyclical components in GDP, credit volumes and house prices for the U.S. and the five largest European economies. With the exception of Germany, we find large and long cycles in credit and house prices, which are highly...