This paper shows that the explanation of the decline in the volatility of GDP growth since the mid 1980s is not the decline in the volatility of exogenous shocks but rather a change in their propagation mechanism. (JEL: E32, E37, C32, C53) (c) 2008 by the European Economic Association.

This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural vector autoregression are truly structural? Second, can the problem of non-fundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first...