Many economic time series exhibit dramatic breaks associated with events such as economic recessions, financial panics, and currency crises. Such changes in regime may arise from tipping points or other nonlinear dynamics and are core to some of the most important questions in macroeconomics....

This paper addresses the poor performance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in the estimation of low-noise dynamic factor models, commonly used in macroeconomic forecasting and nowcasting. We show analytically and in Monte Carlo simulations how the EM algorithm stagnates in a...