Despite the productive efforts of economists, the disequilibrium nature of the economic system and imprecise predictions persist. One reason for this outcome is that traditional econometric models and estimation and inference methods cannot provide the necessary quantitative information for the...

This paper quantifies liquidity and credit premia in German and French government bond yields. For this purpose, we estimate term structures of government-guaranteed agency bonds and exploit the fact that any difference in their yields vis-`a-vis government bonds can be attributed to differences...

We derive simple algebraic expressions for score tests of serial correlation in the levels and squares of common and idiosyncratic factors in static factor models with (semi) parametrically specified elliptical distributions even though one must generally compute the likelihood by simulation. We...

This paper analyses the evolution of systematic risk of banking industries in eight advanced countries using weekly data from 1990 to 2012. The estimation of time-varying betas is done by means of a Bayesian state space model with stochastic volatility, whose results are contrasted with those of...

We propose to estimate heteroskedastic dynamic factor models using the Kalman filter, where the state vector is augmented with the heteroskedastic disturbances. Although this model is not conditionally Gaussian, Monte Carlo results show that parameters can be accurately estimated.

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics In this paper we survey recent developments on economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

National statistical institutes generally apply design-based techniques like the generalized regression estimator to compile official statistics. These techniques, however, have relatively large design variances in the case of small sample sizes. In such cases, model based small area estimation...