Skepticism toward traditional identifying assumptions based on exclusion restrictions has led to a surge in the use of structural VAR models in which structural shocks are identified by restricting the sign of the responses of selected macroeconomic aggregates to these shocks. Researchers...

We study the effects of government spending by using a structural, large dimensional, dynamic factor model. We find that the government spending shock is non-fundamental for the variables commonly used in the structural VAR literature, so that its impulse response functions cannot be...

We use a dynamic factor model to provide a semi-structural representation for 101 quarterly US macroeconomic series. We find that (i) the US economy is well described by a number of structural shocks between two and six. Focusing on the four-shock specification, we identify, using sign...

A method to evaluate cyclical models which does not require knowledge of the DGP and the exact specification of the aggregate decision rules is proposed. We derive robust restrictions in a class of models; use some to identify structural shocks in the data and others to evaluate the class or...

A common view in the literature is that the effect of energy price shocks on macroeconomic aggregates is asymmetric in energy price increases and decreases. We show that widely used asymmetric vector autoregressive models of the transmission of energy price shocks are misspecified, resulting in...

Sign restrictions on the responses generated by structural vector autoregressive models have been proposed as an alternative approach to the use of exclusion restrictions on the impact multiplier matrix. In recent years such models have been increasingly used to identify demand and supply shocks...

This paper studies business cycle interdependence among the industrialized countries since 1958. Using the spillover index methodology recently proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) and based on the generalized VAR framework, I develop an alternative measure of comovement of macroeconomic...

A researcher is interested in a set of variables that he wants to model with a vector autoregression and he has a dataset with more variables. Which variables from the dataset to include in the VAR, in addition to the variables of interest? This question arises in many applications of VARs, in...

We consider an economy where the oil price, industrial production, and other macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to a variety of fundamental shocks. We estimate the effects of different structural shocks using robust sign restrictions suggested by theory using US data for the 1973-2007...

There is a fast growing literature that partially identifies structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of a subset of the endogenous variables to a particular structural shock (sign-restricted SVARs). To date, the methods that have been used are...