Identification of structural VARs using sign restrictions has become increasingly popular in the academic literature. This paper (i) argues that identification of shocks can benefit from introducing a global dimension, and (ii) shows that summarising information by the median of the available...

Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s' United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank – which is near-universally...

How long does it take for exchange rate changes to pass through into inflation? Does it make a difference whether the exchange rate depreciates or appreciates? Do relatively large exchange rate changes entail more exchange rate pass-through? In this paper, we examine possible non-linearities in...

This paper follows the Bayesian time-varying VAR approach with stochastic volatility developed by Primiceri (2005), to analyse whether the reaction of output and prices to interest rate and exchange rate shocks has changed across time (1996-2012) in the Polish economy. The empirical findings...

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modeled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven by different default initial conditions. These initial conditions are...

Global monetary conditions have often been cited as a driving factor of commodity prices. This paper investigates the empirical relationship between US monetary policy and commodity prices by means of a standard VAR system, commonly used in analysing the effects of monetary policy shocks. The...

We study the identification of policy shocks in Bayesian proxy VARs for the case that the instrument consists of sparse qualitative observations indicating the signs of certain shocks. We propose two identification schemes, i.e. linear discriminant analysis and a non-parametric sign concordance...

This paper proposes a novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and applies it to a New Keynesian DSGE model along the lines of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (JPE 2005) and Smets and Wouters (JEEA 2003)....

What are the economic implications of financial and uncertainty shocks? We show that financial shocks cause a decline in output and goods prices, while uncertainty shocks cause a decline in output and an increase in goods prices. In response to un-certainty shocks, firms increase their markups,...

We propose a novel empirical approach to inform monetary policymakers about the potential effects of policy action when facing trade-offs between financial and macroeconomic stability. We estimate a quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) for the euro area covering the real economy, monetary...