In an urban economy, the distribution of people and real estate prices depends on the location of the central business district of a city. As distance from the city center increases, both prices and population density diminish, for travel costs increase in terms of time and money. As...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/ forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rate in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

The surge in the German house prices starting in 2010 raised fears about the emergence of a speculative bubble. Given a local nature of housing markets, it is not clear to what extent the bubble, if any, is spread across different cities. In this paper, we test for speculative house price...

The paper introduces a two-factor model of the common leading and coincident economic indicators. Both factors are unobserved and each of them captures the dynamics of a corresponding group of the observed time series. The common leading factor is assumed to Granger-cause the common coincident...

Composite economic indicator is a very useful tool designed to trace and predict the business cycle conditions. In this paper we study possible extensions of this approach intended to cope with the potential data problems caused by various structural breaks affecting both level and volatility of...

In this paper, we consider a coincident economic indicator model with regime-switching dynamics and with the time series observed at different frequencies, for instance, at monthly and quarterly frequencies. Until now the only solution was to drop the lower frequency series and to estimate the...

One of the important tools of the business cycle research are the signal-extraction techniques (SETs). They allow to study both the stylized facts and the turning points of the business cycles. However, these are highly sensitive to the SETs. In this paper we try to see how some of the SETs...

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...