Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...