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...

In this paper, we empirically assess the predictive accuracy of a large group of models based on the use of principle components and other shrinkage methods, including Bayesian model averaging and various bagging, boosting, LASSO and related methods Our results suggest that model averaging does...