The importance of units with pervasive impacts on a large number of other units in a network has become increasingly recognized in the literature. In this paper we propose a new method to detect such influential or dominant units by basing our analysis on unit-specific residual error variances...

The main purpose of this paper is to construct a financial conditions index (FCI) for South Africa. The analysis extracts the index by applying two alternative approaches (principal component analysis and Kalman filter), which identify an unobservable common factor from a group of external and...

This paper compares alternative estimation procedures for multi-level factor models which imply blocks of zero restrictions on the associated matrix of factor loadings. We suggest a sequential least squares algorithm for minimizing the total sum of squared residuals and a two-step approach based...

This paper compares alternative estimation procedures for multi-level factor models which imply blocks of zero restrictions on the associated matrix of factor loadings. We suggest a sequential least squares algorithm for minimizing the total sum of squared residuals and a two-step approach based...

Purpose: The importance of the financial cycle has become a central point of consideration for policymakers since the 2007-08 financial crisis. This study aimed to construct and characterize the aggregate Australasian financial cycle. Design/methodology/approach: To construct the aggregate...

We construct several measures for the global financial cycle using dynamic factor models and data for 25 advanced and emerging countries over 1980-2019. Our results suggest that global cycles in asset prices and capital flows are highly similar and synchronized, especially during crisis...