We develop a dynamic factor model with time-varying factor loadings and stochastic volatility in both the latent factors and idiosyncratic components. We employ this new measurement tool to study the evolution of international business cycles in the post-Bretton Woods period, using a panel of...

Multi-population mortality forecasting has become an increasingly important area in actuarial science and demography, as a means to avoid long-run divergence in mortality projection. This paper aims to establish a unified state-space Bayesian framework to model, estimate and forecast mortality...

Cycles in the behavior of stock markets have been widely documented. There is an increasing body of literature on whether stock markets anticipate business cycles or its turning points. Several recent studies assert that financial integration impacts positively on business cycle comovements of...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

The failure to describe the time series behaviour of most realexchange rates as temporary deviations from fixedlong-term means may be due to time variation of the equilibriathemselves, see Engel (2000). We implement thisidea using an unobserved components model and decompose theobservations on...

This paper proposes a multi-level dynamic factor model to identify common components in output gap estimates. We pool multiple output gap estimates for 157 countries and decompose them into one global, eight regional, and 157 country-specific cycles. Our approach easily deals with mixed...