Standard economic intuition suggests that asset prices are more sensitive to news than other economic aggregates. This has led many researchers to conclude that asset price data would be very useful for the estimation of business cycle models containing news shocks. This paper shows how to...

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 develop a technique for analyzing the response dynamics of economic variables to structural shocks in linear rational expectations models. Our work differs from standard SVARs since we allow expectations of future variables to enter structural equations. We show how to estimate the...

This paper studies the effects and the transmission mechanism of unexpected monetary policy shocks in an open economy setting within the context of a VAR frame-work. It considers an economy with two sectors, a tradable sector and a non-tradable sector. For a given country, economic sectors are...

This paper describes a methodology to estimate the coefficients, to test specification hypotheses and to conduct policy exercises in multi-country VAR models with cross unit interdependencies, unit specific dynamics and time variations in the coefficients. The framework of analysis is Bayesian:...

This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural VAR are truly structural? Second, can the problem of nonfundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first question is "yes" and...

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...

We build a new empirical model to estimate the global impact of an increase in the volatility of US monetary policy shocks. Specifically, we admit time-varying variances of local structural shocks from a stochastic volatility specification. By allowing for rich dynamic interaction between the...