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...

The number of variables related to long-run economic growth is large compared with the number of countries. Bayesian model averaging is often used to impose parsimony in the cross-country growth regression. The underlying prior is that many of the considered variables need to be excluded from...

Fed's monetary policy announcements convey a mix of news about different kinds of conventional and unconventional policies and about the economy. Financial market responses to these announcements are very leptokurtic: often tiny, but sometimes large. I estimate the underlying structural shocks...

The news about the economy contained in a central bank announcement can affect public expectations. This paper shows, using both event studies and vector autoregressions, that such central bank information effects are an important channel of the transatlantic spillover of monetary policy. They...

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector autoregression. It relies on the...

We estimate spillovers from US monetary policy for different measures in the Federal Reserve's toolkit. We make use of novel measures of exogenous variation in conventional rate policy, forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) based on high-frequency asset-price surprises around...