The degree of comovement of economic activity across states or regions is an issue of utmost importance to policymakers. Asymmetric business cycles are often seen as an impediment to the formation of a common currency area. However, it has been argued that a common monetary policy in itself...

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...

We propose the adaptive elastic net for estimating Vector Autoregressions. Unlike competing methods, this estimator preserves the standard structural-VAR toolkit but at the same time leads to accurate forecasts. We show validity of the bootstrap in constructing unconditional-on-model-selection...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

In this paper, we study the evolution of inflation expectations for two key emerging economies, Brazil and Turkey, using a reduced form model in a state-space framework, where the level of inflation is modeled explicitly. We match the survey-based inflation expectations and inflation targets set...

In assessing drivers of commodity prices and volatility at this stage of the current super-cycle in commodities (year 12 of a projected 25), it is vital to understand that production cost is a fundamental. Moreover, marginal production costs are among the most powerful drivers of commodity...

This paper addresses the poor performance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in the estimation of low-noise dynamic factor models, commonly used in macroeconomic forecasting and nowcasting. We show analytically and in Monte Carlo simulations how the EM algorithm stagnates in a...

Mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) regressions allow to estimate dynamic equations that explain a low-frequency variable by high-frequency variables and their lags. To account for temporal instabilities in this relationship, this paper discusses an extension to MIDAS with time-varying parameters, which...