The relationship between uncertainty and economic activity has attracted substantial interest in recent macroeconomics literature. Empirical work has mostly focused on short-run and medium-term effects of uncertainty shocks. However, there are a number of mechanisms that may cause a response of...

We propose a blended approach which combines identification via heteroskedasticity with the widely used methods of sign restrictions, narrative restrictions, and external instruments.Since heteroskedasticity in the reduced form can be exploited to point identify a set of orthogonal shocks, its...

Based on recent evidence of fractional cointegration in commodity spot and futures markets, we investigate whether a fractionally cointegrated model can provide statistically and/or economically significant forecasts of commodity returns. Specifically, we propose to model and forecast commodity...

This paper proposes and discusses an instrumental variable estimator that can be of particular relevance when many instruments are available. Intuition and recent work (see, e.g., Hahn (2002)) suggest that parsimonious devices used in the construction of the final instruments, may provide...

We propose a new algorithm which allows easy estimation of Vector Autoregressions (VARs) featuring asymmetric priors and time varying volatilities, even when the cross sectional dimension of the system N is particularly large. The algorithm is based on a simple triangularisation which allows to...