The Beveridge-Nelson decomposition defines the trend component in terms of the eventual forecast function, as the value the series would take if it were on its long-run path. The paper in-troduces the multistep Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, which arises when the forecast function is obtained...

We apply a recently proposed Bayesian model selection technique, known as stochastic model specification search, for characterising the nature of the trend in macroeconomic time series. We illustrate that the methodology can be quite successfully applied to discriminate between stochastic and...

Structural change affects the estimation of economic signals, like the underlying growth rate or the seasonally adjusted series. An important issue, which has at- tracted a great deal of attention also in the seasonal adjustment literature, is its detection by an expert procedure. The...

The paper deals with the construction of a synthetic indicator of economic growth, obtained by projecting a quarterly measure of aggregate economic activity, namely gross domestic product (GDP), into the space spanned by a finite number of smooth principal components, representative of the...

We address the problem of selecting the common factors that are relevant for forecasting macroeconomic variables. In economic forecasting using diffusion indexes the factors are ordered, according to their importance, in terms of relative variability, and are the same for each variable to...

Structural change affects the estimation of economic signals, like the underlying growth rate or the seasonally adjusted series. An important issue, which has attracted a great deal of attention also in the seasonal adjustment literature, is its detection by an expert procedure. The...

Extracting and forecasting the volatility of financial markets is an important empirical problem. Time series of realized volatility or other volatility proxies, such as squared returns, display long range dependence. Exponential smoothing (ES) is a very popular and successful forecasting and...

We consider the problem of estimating the high-dimensional autocovariance matrix of a stationary random process, with the purpose of out of sample prediction and feature extraction. This problem has received several solutions. In the nonparametric framework, the literature has concentrated on...

The chapter deals with parametric models for the measurement of the business cycle in economic time series. It presents univariate methods based on parametric trend - cycle decompositions and multivariate models featuring a Phillips type relationship between the output gap and inflation and the...

The formulation of unobserved components models raises some relevant interpretative issues, owing to the existence of alternative observationally equivalent specifi cations, differing for the timing of the disturbances and their covariance matrix. We illustrate them with reference to unobserved...