Numerous tests designed to detect realized jumps over a fixed time span have been proposed and extensively studied in the financial econometrics literature. These tests differ from “long time span tests” that detect jumps by examining the magnitude of the jump intensity parameter in the data...

In economics, common factors are often assumed to underlie the co-movements of a set of macroeconomic variables. For this reason, many authors have used estimated factors in the construction of prediction models. In this paper, we begin by surveying the extant literature on diffusion indexes. We...