This paper provides a review of the recent literature concerned with large factor models as forecast devices.We focus on factor models that account for mixed-frequency data and missing observations at the end of the sample. These are data irregularities applied forecasters have to cope with in...

This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy. Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used to determine the factors by principal component analysis. The factors enter a linear dynamic model for German GDP. To evaluate its empirical properties,...