Nowadays, modeling and forecasting the volatility of stock markets have become central to the practice of risk management; they have become one of the major topics in financial econometrics and they are principally and continuously used in the pricing of financial assets and the Value at Risk,...

In this paper we present two new composite leading indicators of economicactivity in Germany estimated using a dynamic factor model with and withoutregime switching. The obtained optimal inferences of business cycle turningpoints indicate that the two-state regime switching procedure leads to...