A large strand of the literature on panel data models has focused on explicitly modelling the cross-section dependence between panel units. Factor augmented approaches have been proposed to deal with this issue. Under a mild restriction on the correlation of the factor loadings, we show that...

We develop a novel approach based on the generalised canonical correlation (GCC) analysis to consistently estimating the multilevel factor model and providing the proper inference theory for the high dimensional panel data. Importantly, our approach is shown to be robust to a non-zero...