Does Bayesian Shrinkage Help to Better Reflect What Happened during the Subprime Crisis?

We study the contagion effects of a U.S. housing shock on OECD countries over the period of the subprime crisis. Considering a large database containing national macroeconomic, financial, and trade dynamic variables for 17 OECD countries, we evaluate forecasting accuracy, and perform a structural analysis exercise using VAR models of different sizes: a standard VAR estimated by OLS and a MEDIUM and LARGE VARs estimated by a Bayesian shrinkage procedure. Our main findings are that: First, the largest specification outperforms the smallest one in terms of forecast accuracy. Second, the MEDIUM VAR outperforms both the LARGE BVAR and the SMALL VAR in the case of structural analysis. So the MEDIUM VAR is sufficient to provide plausible impulse responses, and reproduce more realistically what happened during the subprime crisis. Third, the Bayesian shrinkage procedure is preferable to the standard OLS estimation in the case of an international contagion study.