In this paper we discuss how the point and density forecasting performance of Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs) is affected by a number of specification choices. We adopt as a benchmark a common specification in the literature, a BVAR with variables entering in levels and a prior modeled...

Recently, considerable emphasis has been placed on the problems arising out of cross-sectional dependence in panel unit root tests. This paper adopts the factor-based cross-sectional dependence paradigm of Bai and Ng (2005) but suggests alternative factor extraction methods. Some theoretical...