We optimally incorporate factors estimated from a large panel of macroeconomic time series in the estimation of two relevant signals related to real activity: business cycle fluctuations and the medium to long-run component of output growth. This latter signal conveys information on the growth...

We show how monetary aggregates can be usefully incorporated in forecasts of inflation. This requires fully disregarding the high-frequency fluctuations blurring the money/inflation relation, i.e., the projection of inflation onto monetary aggregates must be restricted to the low frequencies....

We explore the use of nowcasts from the Philadelphia Survey of Professional Forecasters as a starting point for macroeconomic forecasting. Specifically, survey nowcasts are treated as anadditional observation of the time series of interest. This simple approach delivers enhanced model...

We investigate the reaction of output to government spending shocks at the zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest rate when government and private consumption are non-separable in preferences. In particular, substitutability between private and government consumption significantly...

We derive the limit of the expected periodogram in the unit-root case under general conditions. This function is seen to be independent of time, thus sharing a fundamental property with the stationary case equivalent. We discuss the consequences of this result to the frequency domain...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the business cycles of the European Union countries and of the two main industrialised countries outside the Union, the United States and Japan. We use the spectral analysis to identify three main features of the business cycles:   1- The duration...

We develop a multivariate filter which is an optimal (in the mean squared error sense) approximation to the ideal filter that isolates a specified range of fluctuations in a time series, e.g., business cycle fluctuations in macroeconomic time series. This requires knowledge of the true...