Oil market VAR models have become the standard tool for understanding the evolution of the real price of oil and its impact in the macro economy. As this literature has expanded at a rapid pace, it has become increasingly difficult for mainstream economists to understand the differences between...

It is customary to suggest that the asymmetry in the transmission of oil price shocks to real output is well established. Much of the empirical work cited as being in support of asymmetries, however, has not directly tested the hypothesis of an asymmetric transmission of oil price innovations....

A common problem in estimating dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models is that the structural parameters of economic interest are only weakly identified. As a result, classical confidence sets and Bayesian credible sets will not coincide even asymptotically, and the mean, mode, or median...