Summary A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference series. (2) The relation between the reference series and the indicator should be statistically significant and stable...

Abstract The demand for an accurate financial risk management involving larger numbers of assets is strong not only in view of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Especially dependencies among assets have not been captured adequately. While standard multivariate copulas have added some...

Summary This paper develops a factor model for forecasting inflation in the euro area. The model can handle variables with different timeliness, sample size and frequency. We show that the forecasts based on the factor model outperform naïve random walk forecasts, a hard to beat benchmark for...

Practitioners often have at their disposal a large number of instruments that are weakly exogenous for the parameter of interest. However, not every instrument has the same predictive power for the endogenous variable, and using too many instruments can induce bias. We consider two ways of...

This paper aims at testing and modeling business-cycle asymmetries within a structural time-series framework, allowing for smooth transition in the parameters characterizing the cyclical component, namely, the damping factor and the frequency. An LM test of linearity is derived, and...

This paper reconsiders the conventional use of econometric models, especially identified vector autoregressive models, in guiding monetary policy. The main question I explore is whether these models are seriously flawed because they ignore asymmetries in the business cycles. Toward that end,...

Summary Following standard real business cycle theory, long run economic growth and short run business cycle fluctuations are attributed to a series of productivity shocks propagated by the economic system which is assumed to be in a rational expectations equilibrium. Characterizing the...