There is a wide literature on the dynamic adjustment of employment and its relationship with the business cycle. Our aim is to propose a statistical model that offers a congruent representation of post-war UK labour market. We use a cointegrated vector autoregressive Markov-switching model where...

In this paper we suggest a framework to assess the degree of reliability of provisional estimates as forecasts of final data, and we reexamine the question of the most appropriate way in which available data should be used for ex ante forecasting in the presence of a data revision process....

We propose a general framework to study whether and how common trends and common cycles are still present when the original variables are linearly aggregated or only a subset of them is analysed. This is particularly important because of the adoption in empirical analysis of aggregated data on a...

After the creation of the European Monetary Union (EMU), both the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB) are focusing more and more on the evolution of the EMU as a whole, rather than on single member countries. A particularly relevant issue from a policy point of view is...

Time series models are often adopted for forecasting because of their simplicity and good performance. The number of parameters in these models increases quickly with the number of variables modelled, so that usually only univariate or small-scale multivariate models are considered. Yet, data...

This paper develops tests for selection of competing non-linear dynamic models. The null hypothesis is that the models are equally close the Data Generating Process (DGP), according to a certain measure of closeness. The alternative is that one model is closer to the DGP. The models can be...

The relationships between real wages, output per capita, inflation and unemployment in Italy between 1970 and 1994, are modelled using a cointegrated vector autoregression. There is evidence of a change in the underlying equilibria and in the dynamic evolution of the variables, probably...

This paper analyses two features of concern to policy-makers in the countries of the prospective of the European Monetary Union: the solvency of their government finances; and the accuracy of fiscal forecasts. Extending the existing methodology of solvency tests, the paper finds that, with few...

We show that the standard condition for MSFE encompassing is no longer valid when the forecasts to be compared are biased. We propose a simple modification of such a condition and of tests for its validity. The relationship between these tests, pooling regressions and tests for non-nested...

This paper compares different ways to estimate the current state of the economy using factor models that can handle unbalanced datasets. Due to the different release lags of business cycle indicators, data unbalancedness often emerges at the end of multivariate samples, which is sometimes...