Olea, José Luis Montiel; Plagborg-Møller, Mikkel; … - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2025
What should applied macroeconomists know about local projection (LP) and vector autoregression (VAR) impulse response estimators? The two methods share the same estimand, but in finite samples lie on opposite ends of a bias-variance trade-off. While the low bias of LPs comes at a quite steep...