This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget shares distributions (HBSDs) - defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities - for a large sample of Italian households in the period...

In this paper we explore the statistical properties of the distributions of consumption expenditures for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. Goodness-of-fit tests show that household aggregate (and age-conditioned) consumption distributions are not log-normal. Rather,...

We propose a refinement of the criterion by Bai and Ng [2002] for determining the number of static factors in factor models with large datasets. It consists in multiplying the penalty function times a constant which tunes the penalizing power of the function itself as in the Hallin and Lika...

This note discusses some problems possibly arising when approximating via Monte-Carlo simulations the distributions of goodness-of-fit test statistics based on the empirical distribution function. We argue that failing to reestimate unknown parameters on each simulated Monte-Carlo sample - and...

We propose a new method for multivariate forecasting which combines the Generalized Dynamic Factor Model (GDFM) and the multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditionally Heteroskedastic (GARCH) model. We assume that the dynamic common factors are conditionally heteroskedastic. The GDFM,...

We test the importance of multivariate information for modelling and forecasting inflation's conditional mean and variance. In the literature, the existence of inflation's conditional heteroskedasticity has been debated for years, as it seemed to appear only in some datasets and for some lag...

We use the Generalized Dynamic Factor Model proposed by Forni et al. [2000] in order to study the dynamics of the rate of growth of output and investment and establish stylized facts of business cycles. By using quarterly firm level data relative to 660 US firms for 20 years, we investigate the...

Estimating the response of hours worked to technology shocks is often considered as a crucial step for evaluating the applicability of macroeconomic models to reality. In particular, Galí [1999] has considered the conditional correlation between employment and productivity as a key tool for...

We propose a new model for volatility forecasting which combines the Generalized Dynamic Factor Model (GDFM) and the GARCH model. The GDFM, applied to a large number of series, captures the multivariate information and disentangles the common and the idiosyncratic part of each series of returns....

We review, under a historical perspective, the developement of the problem of non-fundamentalness of Moving Average (MA) representations of economic models, starting from the work by Hansen and Sargent [1980]. Nonfundamentalness typically arises when agents' information space is larger than the...