This paper discusses how to specify the order of a state-space model. To do so, we start by revising existing approaches and find in them two basic shortcomings: (i) some of them have a poor performance in short samples and (ii) most of them are not robust, meaning that their performance...

Recent work in the macroeconometric literature considers the problem of summarising efficiently a large set of variables and using this summary for a variety of purposes including forecasting. This paper applies a new factor extraction method to the extraction of core inflation and forecasting...

Recent work in the macroeconometric literature considers the problem of summarising efficiently a large set of variables and using this summary for a variety of purposes including forecasting. Work in this field has been carried out in a series of recent papers. This paper provides an...

We will concentrate on the numerical computation of so-called tall and skinny solutions X of the Sylvester equations AX−XB=C. By this we mean that A is an n×n matrix with cheaply applicable action (A is for example sparse), and B a k×k matrix, with k≪n. This type of Sylvester equation...

A new procedure to predict with subspace methods is presented in this paper. It is based on combining multiple forecasts obtained from setting a range of values for a specic parameter that is typically xed by the user in the subspace methods literature. An algorithm to compute these predictions...