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Working Paper
The Role of the Prior in Estimating VAR Models with Sign Restrictions
Several recent studies have expressed concern that the Haar prior typically imposed in estimating sign-identified VAR models may be unintentionally informative about the implied prior for the structural impulse responses. This question is indeed important, but we show that the tools that have been used in the literature to illustrate this potential problem are invalid. Specifically, we show that it does not make sense from a Bayesian point of view to characterize the impulse response prior based on the distribution of the impulse responses conditional on the maximum likelihood estimator of ...
Working Paper
Comment on Giacomini, Kitagawa and Read's 'Narrative Restrictions and Proxies'
In a series of recent studies, Raffaella Giacomini and Toru Kitagawa have developed an innovative new methodological approach to estimating sign-identified structural VAR models that seeks to build a bridge between Bayesian and frequentist approaches in the literature. Their latest paper with Matthew Read contains thought-provoking new insights about modeling narrative restrictions in sign-identified structural VAR models. My discussion puts their contribution into the context of Giacomini and Kitagawa’s broader research agenda and relates it to the larger literature on estimating ...
Working Paper
Joint Bayesian Inference about Impulse Responses in VAR Models
Structural VAR models are routinely estimated by Bayesian methods. Several recent studies have voiced concerns about the common use of posterior median (or mean) response functions in applied VAR analysis. In this paper, we show that these response functions can be misleading because in empirically relevant settings there need not exist a posterior draw for the impulse response function that matches the posterior median or mean response function, even as the number of posterior draws approaches infinity. As a result, the use of these summary statistics may distort the shape of the impulse ...