It is sometimes argued that central banks influence the private economy in the short run through controlling a specific component of high powered money, not its total amount. Using a structural VAR approach, this paper evaluates this claim empirically, in the context of the Japanese economy. It...

This paper investigates the international dimension of productivity and demand shocks to US manufacturing. Identifying shocks with sign restrictions based on standard theory predictions we find that productivity gains in manufacturing - our measure of tradables - have substantial aggregate...

This paper uses long-run restrictions on a three-variable system containing output growth, real wage growth and the differenced unemployment rate, to isolate three 'structural' shocks which drove business cycle fluctuations in Spain during 1970-94. These shocks are interpreted as aggregate...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a set of variables is informationally sufficient, i.e. it contains enough information to estimate the structural shocks with a VAR model. Based on such conditions, we suggest a procedure to test for informational sufficiency. Moreover, we...

We provide evidence on the nature of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. To identify policy shocks in a setting with both economic and financial variables, we combine traditional monetary vector autoregression (VAR) analysis with high frequency identification (HFI) of monetary policy...