In structural vector autoregressive analysis it has become quite popular to identify some structural shocks of interest by external instruments or proxies. This study points out a range of areas where such proxies have been used and sketches the way the proxies have been constructed. It reviews...

Several recent studies consider a set of proxies to identify different monetary policy shocks for different regions in the world. We show that the way the proxies are used to identify the monetary policy shocks may lead to correlated shocks and dubious structural analysis and we demonstrate how...

This paper analyzes possibly time-varying shock transmission in structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models when the reduced-form VAR coefficients are time-invariant and the shocks are identified through non-Gaussianity. To check for possible time-variation in the impulse responses, we propose...

In conventional proxy VAR analysis, the shocks of interest are identified by external instruments. This is typically accomplished by considering the covariance of the instruments and the reduced-form residuals. Alternatively, the instruments may be internalized by augmenting the VAR process by...

We consider structural vector autoregressions that are identified through stochastic volatility. Our analysis focuses on whether a particular structural shock can be identified through heteroskedasticity without imposing any sign or exclusion restrictions. Three contributions emerge from our...