A financial conditions index (FCI) is designed to summarise the state of financial markets. We construct two with UK data. The first is the first principal component (PC) of a set of financial indicators. The second comes from a new approach taking information from a large set of macroeconomic...

A financial conditions index (FCI) is designed to summarise the state of financial markets. Two are constructed with UK data. The first is the first principal component of a set of financial indicators. The second comes from a new approach taking information from a large set of macroeconomic...

This paper assesses the forecasting performance of various variable reduction and variable selection methods. A small and a large set of wisely chosen variables are used in forecasting the industrial production growth for four Euro Area economies. The results indicate that the Automatic Leading...