Mild factor loading instability, particularly if sufficiently independent across the different constituent variables, does not affect the estimation of the number of factors, nor subsequent estimation of the factors themselves (see e.g. Stock and Watson (2009)). This result does not hold in the...

This paper provides new evidence on the rationality of early releases of industrial production (IP) and producer price index (PPI) data. Rather than following the usual practice of examining only first available and fully revised data, we examine the entire revision history for each variable....