This work brings together two distinct pieces of evidence concerning, at the macro level, international distributions of incomes and their dynamics, and, at the micro level, the size distributions of firms and the properties of their growth rates. First, our empirical analysis provides a new...

We derive asymptotic properties of estimators and test statistics to determine - in a grouped data setting - common versus group-specific factors. Despite the fact that our test statistic for the number of common factors, under the null, involves a parameter at the boundary (related to unit...

To examine whether including economic data on other countries could improve the forecast of U.S. GDP growth, we construct a large data set of 77 countries representing over 90 percent of global GDP. Our benchmark model is a dynamic factor model using U.S. data only, which we extend to include...