In this paper, we evaluate the marginal predictive content of a variety of new business conditions and economic uncertainty indexes. Our indexes are defined as latent factors extracted from a high dimensional macroeconomic dataset (business conditions indexes) and as functions of predictive...

In this paper, we provide new empirical evidence of the relative usefulness of interval (density) and point forecasts of asset-return volatility, in the context of financial risk management using high frequency data. In our evaluation we use both statistical criteria (i.e., accuracy of...

In the context of latent factor models that are widely used in economics, a common assumption made is one of factor pervasiveness, which implies that all available predictor or informative variables in a dataset, with the possible exception of a negligible number of them, load significantly on...

When specifying and estimating latent factor models, a common assumption made is one of factor pervasiveness, which requires that Γ'Γ/N converges to a positive definite matrix, as N → ∞, where Γ denotes the loading matrix of the factor model. This paper builds on the recent nascent...

In this paper, we introduce a class of multi-frequency financial and macroeconomic uncertainty measures. The factors are latent variables extracted from a state space model that includes multiple different frequencies of non-parametrically estimated components of quadratic variation, as well as...

This paper proposes new jackknife IV estimators that are robust to the effectsof many weak instruments and error heteroskedasticity in a cluster sample settingwith cluster-specific effects and possibly many included exogenous regressors. Theestimators that we propose are designed to properly...

This paper looks at the patterns of causation between income, export, import, and investment growth for 25 developing countries. Our approach differs from previous efforts in a number of ways. First, we examine each country individually in order to allow for complete heterogeneity and properly...