We show that factor forecasting models deliver real-time gains over autoregressive models for US real activity variables during the recent period, but are less successful for nominal variables. The gains are largely due to the Financial Crisis period, and are primarily at the shortest (one...

We study the forecasting performance of three alternative large scale approaches using a dataset for Germany that consists of 123 variables in quarterly frequency. These three approaches handle the dimensionality problem evoked by such a large dataset by aggregating information, yet on different...

Quarterly GDP figures usually are published with a delay of some weeks. A common way to generate GDP series of higher frequency, i.e. to nowcast GDP, is to use available indicators to calculate a single index by means of a common factor derived from a dynamic factor model (DFM). This paper deals...

We study the forecasting performance of three alternative large scale approaches for German key macroeconomic variables using a dataset that consists of 123 variables in quarterly frequency. These three approaches handle the dimensionality problem evoked by such a large dataset by aggregating...

In this paper we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model featuring stochastic shifts in the volatility of both the latent common factor and the idiosyncratic components. We take a Bayesian perspective and derive a Gibbs sampler to obtain the posterior density of the model parameters. This...

This paper studies the pathways for the propagation of shocks across G7 and major Asia-Pacific countries using multi-horizon forecasts of real GDP growth from 1995 to 2017. We show that if the forecasts are efficient in the long run, results obtained using the forecasts are comparable to those...