We provide a summary updated guide for the construction, use and evaluation of leading indicators, and an assessment of the most relevant recent developments in this field of economic forecasting. To begin with, we analyse the problem of selecting a target coincident variable for the leading...

This Paper reviews recent econometric work on factor models in large cross-sections of time series. In this literature, traditional factor analysis is adapted to develop parsimonious estimation methods for high dimension time series models. The review covers problems of consistency and rates –...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

This paper investigates the relationship between the main features of business cycles and the institutional and structural characteristics of countries of up to 62 industrial, emerging and formerly centrally planned economies from all continents. We derive the business cycle characteristics...

This Paper uses multi-step forecasting models at horizons of 4 and 8 quarters to forecast and explain the growth of real per capita US GDP. In the modeling strategy, a priori sign restrictions play an important role. They are imposed not on impulse response functions but directly on the reduced...

This paper investigates the accuracy and heterogeneity of output growth and inflation forecasts during the current and the four preceding NBER-dated U.S. recessions. We generate forecasts from six different models of the U.S. economy and compare them to professional forecasts from the Federal...

This paper characterizes business cycle phenomena in a sample of 27 developed and developing economies using a univariate Markov regime switching approach. It examines the efficacy of this approach for detecting business cycle turning points and for identifying distinct economic regimes for each...

Typical analyses of trends and cycles take as given some (one) observable economic variable in whose time path a researcher wishes to find trend and cycle movements. But individual sectors and regions in aggregate economies move neither perfectly with nor independently of each other -- why is it...

We provide methods for forecasting variables and predicting turning points in panel Bayesian VARs. We specify a flexible model that accounts for both interdependencies in the cross section and time variations in the parameters. Posterior distributions for the parameters are obtained for...

This paper examines the performance of alternative models for predicting turning points in the UK growth cycle. The models are based upon an interpretation of movements in the CSO's composite longer and shorter leading indicators. The difference between the models lies in the choice of method...