We estimate the effect of government spending shocks on the US economy with a time-varying parameter vector autoregression. The recent Great Recession period appears to be characterized by uniquely large impulse responses of output to fiscal shocks. Moreover, the particularity of this period is...

We estimate the dynamic effects of government spending shocks, using time-varying volatility in US data modeled through a Markov switching process. We find that the average government spending multiplier is significantly and persistently above one, driven by a crowding-in of private consumption...

We consider structural vector autoregressions identified through stochastic volatility. Our focus is on whether a particular structural shock is identified by heteroskedasticity without the need to impose any sign or exclusion restrictions. Three contributions emerge from our exercise: (i) a set...

Structural VAR models are frequently identified using sign restrictions on contemporaneous impulse responses. We develop a methodology that can handle a set of prior distributions that is much larger than the one currently allowed for by traditional methods. We then develop an importance sampler...