A researcher is interested in a set of variables that he wants to model with a vector autoregression and he has a dataset with more variables. Which variables from the dataset to include in the VAR, in addition to the variables of interest? This question arises in many applications of VARs, in...

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Will international income data tell which matter when all are treated symmetrically a priori? We find that growth determinants emerging from agnostic Bayesian model averaging and classical model selection procedures...

This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small-sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...

This note simplifies the Waggoner and Zha (1999) formula for the conditional distribution of shocks, discusses its linear algebraic intuition, and shows how to account for the dependence between the conditional and unconditional predictive densities when comparing them.