In this paper we study international linkages when forecasting unemployment rates in a sample of 24 OECD economies. We … propose a Global Unemployment Factor (GUF) and test its predictive ability considering in-sample and out-of-sample exercises … information to predict domestic unemployment rates, at least for these last seven countries …

, the model is applied to postwar monthly US unemployment series and we discover a significantly periodic cycle. Furthermore …, a comparison is made between the performance of the periodic unobserved components time series model and a periodic …