In the context of dynamic factor models (DFM), it is known that, if the cross-sectional and time dimensions tend to infinity, the Kalman filter yields consistent smoothed estimates of the underlying factors. When looking at asymptotic properties, the cross- sectional dimension needs to increase...

Relations between economic variables can often not be exploited for forecasting, suggesting that predictors are weak in the sense that estimation uncertainty is larger than bias from ignoring the relation. In this paper, we propose a novel bagging predictor designed for such weak predictor...

We consider a one-period portfolio optimization problem under model uncertainty. For this purpose, we introduce a measure of model risk. We derive analytical results for this measure of model risk in the mean-variance problem assuming we have observations drawn from a normal variance mixture...

We introduce in this paper a testing approach that allows checking whether two financial institutions are systemically equivalent, with systemic risk measured by CoVaR (Adrian and Brunnermeier, 2011). The test compares the difference in CoVaR forecasts for two financial institutions via a...

The vector innovations structural time series framework is proposed as a way of modelling a set of related time series. As with all multivariate approaches, the aim is to exploit potential interseries dependencies to improve the fit and forecasts. The model is based around an unobserved vector...

The vector innovations structural time series framework is proposed as a way of modelling a set of related time series. As with all multivariate approaches, the aim is to exploit potential interseries dependencies to improve the fit and forecasts. The model is based around an unobserved vector...

The flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) has the effect of shifting trade patterns, especially those of developing countries. With FDI flow growth, vertical intra-industry trade increases as those production-fragmentation-led investments mature. This relation is readily apparent in the...

Real-time macroeconomic data are typically incomplete for today and the immediate past (‘ragged edge’) and subject to revision. To enable more timely forecasts the recent missing data have to be imputed. The paper presents a state-space model that can deal with publication lags and data...

In this paper, transforms are used with exponential smoothing, in the quest for better forecasts. Two types of transforms are explored: those which are applied to a time series directly, and those which are applied indirectly to the prediction errors. The various transforms are tested on a large...

We propose to estimate heteroskedastic dynamic factor models using the Kalman filter, where the state vector is augmented with the heteroskedastic disturbances. Although this model is not conditionally Gaussian, Monte Carlo results show that parameters can be accurately estimated.