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...

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...

This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...

We build a model of the euro area incorporating financial market frictions at the level of firms and households. Entrepreneurs borrow from financial intermediaries in order to purchase business capital, in the spirit of the "financial accelerator" literature. We also introduce two types of...

We investigate the impact of fiscal stimuli at different levels of the government debt-to-GDP-ratio for a sample of 17 European countries from 1970 to 2010. This is implemented in an interacted panel VAR framework in which all coefficient parameters are allowed to change continuously with the...

We build a novel macro-finance model that combines a semi-structural macroeconomic module with arbitrage-free yield-curve dynamics. We estimate it for the United States and the euro area using a Bayesian approach and jointly infer the real equilibrium interest rate (r*), trend inflation (Û*),...

Structural VARs have been extensively used in empirical macroeconomics during the last two decades, particularly in analyses of monetary policy. Existing Bayesian procedures for structural VARs are at best confined to a severly limited handling of cointegration restrictions. This paper extends...

The paper considers a Bayesian approach to the cointegrated VAR model with a uniform prior on the cointegration space. Building on earlier work by Villani (2005b), where the posterior probability of the cointegration rank can be calculated conditional on the lag order, the current paper also...

In this paper we review the methodology of forecasting with log-linearised DSGE models using Bayesian methods. We focus on the estimation of their predictive distributions, with special attention being paid to the mean and the covariance matrix of h-step ahead forecasts. In the empirical...

This paper illustrates how to handle a sequence of extreme observations—such as those recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic—when estimating a Vector Autoregression, which is the most popular time-series model in macroeconomics. Our results show that the ad-hoc strategy of dropping these...