This paper investigates whether information from foreign yield curves helps forecast domestic yieldcurves out-of-sample. A nested methodology to forecast yield curves in domestic and internationalsettings is applied on three major countries (the US, Germany and the UK). This novel methodologyis...

In this paper we propose a methodology to estimate a dynamic factor model on data sets with an arbitrary pattern of missing data. We modify the Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithm as proposed for a dynamic factor model by Watson and Engle (1983) to the case with general pattern of missing...

This paper describes how we constructed a real-time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We...

This paper proposes a methodology to nowcast and forecast inflation using data with sampling frequency higher than monthly. The nowcasting literature has been focused on GDP, typically using monthly indicators in order to produce an accurate estimate for the current and next quarter. This paper...

Economists have imperfect knowledge of the present state of the economy and even of the recent past. Many key statistics are released with a long delay and they are subsequently revised. As a consequence, unlike weather forecasters, who know what is the weather today and only have to predict the...

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics In this paper we survey recent developments on economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

SUMMARY In this paper we modify the expectation maximization algorithm in order to estimate the parameters of the dynamic factor model on a dataset with an arbitrary pattern of missing data. We also extend the model to the case with a serially correlated idiosyncratic component. The framework...

In this paper, we extract common factors from a cross-section of U.S. macro-variables and Treasury zero-coupon yields. We find that two macroeconomic factors have an important predictive content for government bond yields and excess returns. These factors are not spanned by the cross-section of...

This study analyzes the reaction of the U.S. Treasury bond market to innovations in macroeconomic fundamentals. We identify these innovations with macroeconomic news, defined as differences between the actual releases and their market expectations. We show that macroeconomic news explain about...