Index tracking requires building a portfolio of stocks (a replica) whose behaviour is as close as possible to that of a given stock index. Typically, much fewer stocks should appear in the replica than in the index, and there should be no low frequency (persistent) components in the tracking...

The recent crisis has emphasized the role of financial - macroeconomic interactions, and international trade in goods and services, in the transmission of the shocks. Both phenomena, closely related to the higher degree of globalization, are very relevant for small open economies, and...

The accession of ten countries into the European Union makes the forecasting of their key macroeconomic indicators such as GDP growth, inflation and interest rates an exercise of some importance. Because of the transition period, only short spans of reliable time series are available which...

This paper brings together several important strands of the econometrics literature: errorcorrection, cointegration and dynamic factor models. It introduces the Factor-augmented Error Correction Model (FECM), where the factors estimated from a large set of variables in levels are jointly...

In this paper we evaluate the role of a set of variables as leading indicators for Euro-area inflation and GDP growth. Our evaluation is based on using the variables in the ECB Euroarea model database, plus a set of similar variables for the U.S. We compare the forecasting performance of each...