Skepticism toward traditional identifying assumptions based on exclusion restrictions has led to a surge in the use of structural VAR models in which structural shocks are identified by restricting the sign of the responses of selected macroeconomic aggregates to these shocks. Researchers...

This paper investigates the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following  Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate...

We estimate a Markov-switching mixture of two familiar macroeconomic models: A richly parameterized DSGE model and a corresponding BVAR model. We show that the Markov-switching mixture model dominates both individual models and improves the fit considerably. Our estimation indicates that the...

In structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis a Markov regime switching (MS) property can be exploited to identify shocks if the reduced form error covariance matrix varies across regimes. Unfortunately, these shocks may not have a meaningful structural economic interpretation. It is...