Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

The analysis of the financial cycle and its interaction with the macroeconomy has become a central issue for the design of macroprudential policy since the 2007-08 financial crisis. This paper proposes the construction of financial cycle measures for the US based on a large data set of...

The analysis of the financial cycle and its interaction with the macroeconomy has become a central issue for the design of macroprudential policy since the 2007-08 financial crisis. This paper proposes the construction of financial cycle measures for the US based on a large data set of...

High dimensional composite index makes experts' preferences in setting weights a hard task. In the literature, one of the approaches to derive weights from a data set is Principal Component or Factor Analysis that, although conceptually different, they are similar in results when FA is based on...

The paper presents forecasts of headline and core inflation in Estonia with factor models in a recursive pseudo out-of-sample framework. The factors are constructed with a principal component analysis and are then incorporated into vector autoregressive (VAR) forecasting models. The analyses...

The main goal of the article is to investigate forecasting quality of two approaches to modelling main macroeconomic variables without a priori assumptions concerning causality and generate forecasts without additional assumptions regarding regressors. With application of tendency survey data...

The article compares forecast quality from two atheoretical models. Neither method assumed a priori causality and forecasts were generated without additional assumptions about regressors. Tendency survey data was used within the Bayesian averaging of classical estimates (BACE) framework and...