The estimation uncertainty of permanent-transitory decompositions in cointegrated systems

The topic of this paper is the estimation uncertainty of the Stock-Watsonand Gonzalo-Granger permanent-transitory decompositions in the frameworkof the cointegrated vector-autoregression. Specifically, we suggest an approach to construct the confidence interval of the transitory component in agiven period (e.g. the latest observation) by conditioning on the observed datain that period. To calculate asymptotically valid confidence intervals we usethe delta method and two bootstrap variants. As an illustration we analyze theuncertainty of (US) output gap estimates in a system of output, consumption, and investment.