This paper proposes a new way to compute a coincident and a leading index of economic activity. The method provides a unified approach for the selection of the coincident and the leading variables, for averaging them into coincident and leading indexes and for the identification of turning...

We use the information content in the decisions of the NBER Business cycle Dating Committee to construct coincident and leading indices of economic activity for United States. Specifically, we use canonical correlation analysis to filter out the noisy information contained in the coincident...

Since the second half of the nineties the euro area has been subject to a considerable accumulation of temporary and idiosyncratic price shocks. Core inflation indicators for the euro area are thus of utmost interest. Based on euro area-wide data core inflation in this paper is analyzed by means...

Monetary aggregates continue to play an important role in the ECB's policy strategy. This paper revisits the case for money, surveying the ongoing theoretical and empirical debate. The key conclusion is that an exclusive focus on non-monetary factors alone may leave the ECB with an incomplete...

This paper constructs and analyzes core inflation indicators for Saudi Arabia for the period of March 2012 to May 2014 using two alternative approaches: the Exclusion Method (ex food and housing/rent) and the Statistical Method. The findings of the analysis suggest that the ex food and...

The estimation of banks? marginal probabilities of default using structural credit risk models can be enriched incorporating macro-financial variables readily available to economic agents. By combining Delianedis and Geske?s model with a Generalized Dynamic Factor Model into a dynamic t-copula...

After the collapse of the asset price bubble, especially over the period of declining prices of goods and services from the latter 1990s until recently, it is said that certain Japanese firms have been working to stimulate demand by active price adjustment. Nevertheless, over the same period,...

Since the second half of the nineties the euro area has been subject to a considerable accumulation of temporary and idiosyncratic price shocks. Core inflation indicators for the euro area are thus of utmost interest. Based on euro area-wide data core inflation in this paper is analyzed by means...

This paper sums up the results of an ongoing research on the construction of indexes for Colombian economic activity and the characteristics of the business cycle. The author uses the statistical framework known as the generalized dynamic factor model (Forni, Lippi, Hallin, Reichlin, 2000) to...

Monetary aggregates continue to play an important role in the ECB's policy strategy. This paper revisits the case for money, surveying the ongoing theoretical and empirical debate. The key conclusion is that an exclusive focus on non-monetary factors alone may leave the ECB with an incomplete...