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...

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