Factor construction methods are widely used to summarize a large panel of variables by means of a relatively small number of representative factors. We propose a novel factor construction procedure that enjoys the properties of robustness to outliers and of sparsity; that is, having relatively...

Portfolio selection is often faced with large noisy data sets of strongly correlated asset returns, and so is prone to unstable portfolio weights and serious estimation error. To attenuate these problems, this paper proposes a new latent factor model equipped with both a suitable robust...

High-frequency financial data allow us to estimate large volatility matrices with relatively short time horizon. Many novel statistical methods have been introduced to address large volatility matrix estimation problems from a high-dimensional Ito process with microstructural noise...

Quarterly GDP figures usually are published with a delay of some weeks. A common way to generate GDP series of higher frequency, i.e. to nowcast GDP, is to use available indicators to calculate a single index by means of a common factor derived from a dynamic factor model (DFM). This paper deals...