One of the most extended empirical stylized facts about output dynamics in the United States is the positive autocorrelation of output growth. This paper shows that the positive autocorrelation can be better captured by shifts between business cycle states rather than by the standard view of...

Incluye bibliografía ; We develop a twofold analysis of how the information provided by several economic indicators can be used in Markov-switching dynamic factor models to identify the business cycle turning points. First, we compare the performance of a fully non-linear multivariate specifi...

Incluye bibliografía ; We propose a fundamentals-based econometric model for the weekly changes in the euro-dollar rate with the distinctive feature of mixing economic variables quoted at different frequencies. The model obtains good in-sample fi t and, more importantly, encouraging outof-...

Incluye bibliografía ; We examine the finite-sample performance of small versus large scale dynamic factor models. Our Monte Carlo analysis reveals that small scale factor models out-perform large scale models in factor estimation and forecasting for high levels of cross-correlation across the...

Incluye bibliografía ; We extend the Markov-switching dynamic factor model to account for some of the specifi cities of the day-to-day monitoring of economic developments from macroeconomic indicators, such as ragged edges and mixed frequencies. We examine the theoretical benefi ts of this...

We develop a dynamic factor model to compute short term forecasts of the Spanish GDP growth in real time. With this model, we compute a business cycle index which works well as an indicator of the business cycle conditions in Spain. To examine its real time forecasting accuracy, we use real-time...

We present evidence about the loss of the so-called "plucking effect", that is, a high-growth phase of the cycle typically observed at the end of recessions. This result matches the belief, presented informally by different authors, that recession may have now permanent effects, or recession...