It is argued that standard impulse response analysis based on vector autoregressive models has a number of shortcomings. Although the impulse responses are estimated quantities, measures for sampling variability such as confidence intervals are often not provided. If confidence intervals are...

Bootstrap confidence intervals for impulse responses computed from autoregressive processes are considered. A detailed analysis of the methods in current use shows that they are not very reliable in some cases. In particular, there are theoretical reasons for them to have actual coverage...