The Great Recession endured by the main industrialized countries during the period 2008–2009, in the wake of the financial and banking crisis, has pointed out the major role of the financial sector on macroeconomic fluctuations. In this respect, many researchers have started to reconsider the...

We estimate a Markow-switching dynamic factor model with three states based on six leading business cycle indicators for Germany preselected from a broader set using the Elastic Net soft-thresholding rule. The three states represent expansions, normal recessions and severe recessions. We show...

This article evaluates the use of financial data sampled at high frequencies to improve short-term forecasts of quarterly GDP for Mexico. In particular, the mixed data sampling (MIDAS) regression model is employed to incorporate both quarterly and daily frequencies while remaining parsimonious....

We estimate a Markow-switching dynamic factor model with three states based on six leading business cycle indicators for Germany preselected from a broader set using the Elastic Net soft-thresholding rule. The three states represent expansions, normal recessions and severe recessions. We show...

This article evaluates the use of financial data sampled at high frequencies to improve short-term forecasts of quarterly GDP for Mexico. In particular, the mixed data sampling (MIDAS) regression model is employed to incorporate both quarterly and daily frequencies while remaining parsimonious....

We investigate the predictive content of credit and government interest spreads with respect to the Italian GDP growth. Our analysis with Dynamic Model Averaging identifies when interest spreads were more useful predictors of economic activity: these periods are not limited to the Great...

This paper focuses on short-term Lithuanian GDP forecasting using a large monthly dataset. The forecasting accuracy of various factor model specifications is assessed using the out-of-sample forecasting exercise. It is argued that factor extraction by using a simple principal components method...

This paper merges two specifications recently developed in the forecasting literature: the MS-MIDAS model (Guérin and Marcellino, 2013) and the factor-MIDAS model (Marcellino and Schumacher, 2010). The MS-factor MIDAS model that we introduce incorporates the information provided by a large data...

This paper merges two specifications developed recently in the forecasting literature: the MS-MIDAS model introduced by Guérin and Marcellino (2011) and the MIDAS-factor model considered in Marcellino and Schumacher (2010). The MS-factor MIDAS model (MS-FaMIDAS) that we introduce incorporates...

In recent years, factor models have received increasing attention from both econometricians and practitioners in the forecasting of macroeconomic variables. In this context, Bai and Ng (2008) find an improvement in selecting indicators according to the forecast variable prior to factor...