Composite indicators are increasingly important in country comparisons and in policy making. At the same time, the robustness of the results obtained and in particular of the rankings and the conclusions obtained from the analysis it is usually accepted with doubts. In this sense our proposal is...

We review key aspects of forecasting using nonlinear models. Because economic models are typically misspecified, the resulting forecasts provide only an approximation to the best possible forecast. Although it is in principle possible to obtain superior approximations to the optimal forecast...

Existing methods for data interpolation or backdating are either univariate or based on a very limited number of series, due to data and computing constraints that were binding until the recent past. Nowadays large datasets are readily available, and models with hundreds of parameters are fastly...

Existing methods for data interpolation or backdating are either univariate or based on a very limited number of series, due to data and computing constraints that were binding until the recent past. Nowadays large datasets are readily available, and models with hundreds of parameters are fastly...

Measurable aspects of the economic convergence of EU countries form the main topic of this paper. For this purpose, statistical and econometric methods are presented and applied for revealing characteristic elements of such a process. A first group of methods refers mainly to aspects such as:...

We consider the dynamic factor model where the loading matrix, the dynamic factors and the disturbances are treated as latent stochastic processes. We present empirical Bayes methods that enable the efficient shrinkage-based estimation of the loadings and the factors. We show that our estimates...

This paper reviews various treatments of non-metric variables in Partial Least Squares (PLS) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithms. The performance of different treatments is compared in the extensive simulation study under several typical data generating processes and...

In this paper, we compare Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) methods to generate weights for composite indices. In this context we also consider various treatments of non-metric variables when constructing such composite indices. Using simulation studies we find...

An exact maximum likelihood method is developed for the estimation of parameters in a non-Gaussian nonlinear log-density function that depends on a latent Gaussian dynamic process with long-memory properties. Our method relies on the method of importance sampling and on a linear Gaussian...

This paper proposes a generalized repeat sales regression (GRSR) that uses repeat sales from the entire market, in which properties may have heterogeneous value appreciation processes, to estimate price indices for not only the entire market, but also submarkets or customized portfolios of...