The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of macroeconomic conditions and predict the base performance of a firm as represented by Return on Asset (ROA) and macroeconomic variables. The predictor variables used in the construction of the models were selected using PCA. For the full...

The paper presents forecasts of headline and core inflation in Estonia with factor models in a recursive pseudo out-of-sample framework. The factors are constructed with a principal component analysis and are then incorporated into vector autoregressive (VAR) forecasting models. The analyses...

This paper considers smooth principle component analysis for high dimensional data with very large dimensional observations p and moderate number of individuals N. Our setting is similar to traditional PCA, but we assume the factors are smooth and design a new approach to estimate them. By...

We show that the last few components in the principal component analysis of the correlation matrix of a group of stocks may contain useful financial insights by identifying highly correlated pairs or larger groups of stocks. The results of this type of analysis can easily be included in the...

What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? By documenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cycle in a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations a re d riven b y o ne major factor. The...