This paper introduces the concepts of time-specific weak and strong cross section dependence. A double-indexed process is said to be cross sectionally weakly dependent at a given point in time, t, if its weighted average along the cross section dimension (N) converges to its expectation in...

Does schooling generate social returns in excess of the private returns captured by the individual who makes the human capital investment? As a strategy to detect human capital externalities I use Dutch survey data to estimate the impact of the average human capital stock in a region on...

This paper examines the properties of G-7 cycles using a multicountry Bayesian panel VAR model with time variations, unit specific dynamics and cross country interdependences. We demonstrate the presence of a significant world cycle and show that country specific indicators play a much smaller...

This paper presents new evidence on the social returns to education within a macroeconomic growth regression framework. I use improved schooling data and a macro version of the Mincer relationship between education and wages for individual workers. The results suggest that an increase by one...

This paper extends the analysis of infinite dimensional vector autoregressive models (IVAR) proposed in Chudik and Pesaran (2010) to the case where one of the variables or the cross section units in the IVAR model is dominant or pervasive. This extension is not straightforward and involves...

We investigate the impact of fiscal variables on bond yield spreads relative to US Treasury bonds in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey from May 1998 to December 2007. To account for the importance of market expectations we use projected values for fiscal and macroeconomic...

We define nowcasting as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Crucial in this process is to use timely monthly information in order to nowcast key economic variables, such as e.g. GDP, that are typically collected at low frequency and published with long...

We propose a novel framework to assess financial system risk. Using a dynamic factor framework based on state-space methods, we construct coincident measures (‘thermometers’) and a forward looking indicator for the likelihood of simultaneous failure of a large number of financial...

Existing methods for data interpolation or backdating are either univariate or based on a very limited number of series, due to data and computing constraints that were binding until the recent past. Nowadays large datasets are readily available, and models with hundreds of parameters are fastly...

In this paper we study the zero frequency spectral properties of fractionally cointegrated long memory processes and introduce a new frequency domain principal components estimator of the cointegration space and the factor loading matrix for the long memory factors. We find that for fractionally...