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Working Paper
Nowcasting Business Cycles: a Bayesian Approach to Dynamic Heterogeneous Factor Models
We develop a framework for measuring and monitoring business cycles in real time. Following a long tradition in macroeconometrics, inference is based on a variety of indicators of economic activity, treated as imperfect measures of an underlying index of business cycle conditions. We extend existing approaches by permitting for heterogenous lead-lag patterns of the various indicators along the business cycles. The framework is well suited for high-frequency monitoring of current economic conditions in real time - nowcasting - since inference can be conducted in presence of mixed frequency ...
Working Paper
A Dynamic Factor Model of the Yield Curve as a Predictor of the Economy
In this paper, we propose an econometric model of the joint dynamic relationship between the yield curve and the economy to predict business cycles. We examine the predictive value of the yield curve to forecast future economic growth as well as the beginning and end of economic recessions at the monthly frequency. The proposed nonlinear multivariate dynamic factor model takes into account not only the popular term spread but also information extracted from the level and curvature of the yield curve and from macroeconomic variables. The nonlinear model is used to investigate the ...
Working Paper
Firm Dynamics and the Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations
What drives aggregate fluctuations? I test the granular hypothesis, according to which the largest firms in the economy drive aggregate dynamics, by estimating a dynamic factor model with firm-level data and controlling for the propagation of firm-level shocks using multi-firm growth model. Each time series, the growth rate of sales of a specific firm, is decomposed in an unobserved common macroeconomic component and in a residual that I interpret as an idiosyncratic firm-level component. The empirical results suggest that, once I control for aggregate shocks, idiosyncratic shocks do not ...
Working Paper
Nowcasting Indonesia
We produce predictions of the current state of the Indonesian economy by estimating a dynamic factor model on a dataset of eleven indicators (also followed closely by market operators) over the time period 2002 to 2014. Besides the standard difficulties associated with constructing timely indicators of current economic conditions, Indonesia presents additional challenges typical to emerging market economies where data are often scant and unreliable. By means of a pseudo-real-time forecasting exercise we show that our model outperforms univariate benchmarks, and it does comparably with ...