It is emphasized that the shocks in structural vector autoregressions are only identified up to sign and it is pointed out that this feature can result in very misleading confidence intervals for impulse responses if simulation methods such as Bayesian or bootstrap methods are used. The...

Because the parameters of vector autoregressive processes are often difficult to interpret directly, econometricians use quantities derived from the parameters to disentangle the relationships between the variables. Bootstrap methods are often used for inference on the derived quantities....