Incluye bibliografía ; We develop a twofold analysis of how the information provided by several economic indicators can be used in Markov-switching dynamic factor models to identify the business cycle turning points. First, we compare the performance of a fully non-linear multivariate specifi...

Incluye bibliografía ; We extend the Markov-switching dynamic factor model to account for some of the specifi cities of the day-to-day monitoring of economic developments from macroeconomic indicators, such as ragged edges and mixed frequencies. We examine the theoretical benefi ts of this...

We show that an extension of the Markov-switching dynamic factor models that accounts for the speci cities of the day to day monitoring of economic developments such as ragged edges, mixed frequencies and data revisions is a good tool to forecast the Euro area recessions in real time. We provide...

Incluye bibliografía ; En muchos casos, los profesionales de la predicción económica no utilizan los resultados de la investigación econométrica porque esta no se realiza de forma apropiada para su implementación práctica. Este documento intenta cerrar ese hueco que existe entre la...

On BHPS data we measure various indices of social capital at the individual and household level, and use them as explanatory variables in standard consumption insurance tests. We find that two out of three aspects of social capital positively impact on consumption smoothing, by reducing the...

The Consumer Empowerment Index is a pilot exercise, aimed at obtaining a first snapshot of the state of consumer empowerment as measured by the Eurobarometer survey (Special Eurobarometer n. 342). It is neither a final answer on empowerment nor a comprehensive study on all the different facets...

Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) is a nonparametric tecnique for signal extraction in time series based on principal components. However, it requires the intervention of the analyst to identify the frequencies associated to the extracted principal components. We propose a new variant of SSA,...