This paper is concerned with the forecasting performance of variable reduction and variable selection methods using medium and large datasets. The variable reduction methods include Principal Components, Partial Least Squares and Bayesian Shrinkage Regression. The variable selection methods...

We consider forecasting key macroeconomic variables using many predictors extracted from the Eurostat PEEIs dataset. To avoid the curse of dimensionality, we rely on model selection and model reduction. For model selection we use heuristic optimisation of information criteria, including...

This paper investigates the performance of Financial Condition Indexes (FCIs) in forecasting four key macroeconomic variables of EU economies. A wide range of carefully selected financial indicators include Rates and Spreads, Stock Market Indicators and Macroeconomic Quantities. The results...

This paper investigates the estimation of turning points in the business cycles of six major EU economies and the EA. The core dating algorithm as implemented by King and Plosser (1994) is used here and it sheds some more light in the recent financial crisis. We are particularly concerned with...

A mismatch between the time scale of a structural VAR (SVAR) model and that of the time series data used for its estimation can have serious consequences for identification, estimation and interpretation of the impulse response functions. However, the use of mixed frequency data, combined with a...

With reference to S&P 500 daily returns, we report evidence of an in-sample predictive accuracy breakdown for realized variance by GARCH models in correspondence to the March 2020 Covid-19 outbreak. However, a variety of macroeconomic risk, political and social media sentiment uncertainty...

Macroeconomic practitioners frequently work with multivariate time series models such as VARs, factor augmented VARs as well as time-varying parameter versions of these models (including variants with multivariate stochastic volatility). These models have a large number of parameters and, thus,...

In this paper we develop methods for estimation and forecasting in large time-varying parameter vector autoregressive models (TVP-VARs). To overcome computational constraints with likelihood-based estimation of large systems, we rely on Kalman filter estimation with forgetting factors. We also...

This paper introduces a new model of trend (or underlying) inflation. In contrast to many earlier approaches, which allow for trend inflation to evolve according to a random walk, ours is a bounded model which ensures that trend inflation is constrained to lie in an interval. The bounds of this...

A popular account for the demise of the UK monetary targeting regime in the 1980s blames the weak predictive relationships between broad money and inflation and real output. In this paper, we investigate these relationships using a variety of monetary aggregates which were used as intermediate...