Building on Beaudry, Nam and Wang (2011) - hereafter BNW -, we use survey data on consumer sentiment in order to identify the causal effects of confidence shocks on real economic activity in a selection of advanced economies. Starting from a set of closed-economy VAR models, we show that these...

Having efficient and accurate samplers for simulating the posterior distribution is crucial for Bayesian analysis. We develop a generic posterior simulator called the "dynamic striated Metropolis-Hastings (DSMH)" sampler. Grounded in the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, it draws its strengths from...

No, not really. Responding to lingering concerns about the reliability of SVARs, Christiano et al (NBER Macro Annual, 2006, "CEV") propose to combine OLS estimates of a VAR with a spectral estimate of long-run variance. In principle, this could help alleviate specification problems of SVARs in...

This paper estimates monetary policy shocks for Sweden between 1996-2019. I employ the Romer and Romer (2004) (R&R) approach and use annual forecasts of output growth and inflation to estimate monetary policy shocks. I complement the analysis with shocks from a recursive VAR including output,...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

The aim of this paper is to illustrate more than one instance of poor bootstrap performance, and to see how available diagnostic techniques can indicate reliably when and how this poor performance can arise. Two particular features that seem to be important to explain bootstrap discrepancy are...

It is standard to model the output-inflation trade-off as a linear relationship with a time-invariant slope. We assess empirical evidence for three types of nonlinearity in the short-run Phillips curve. At an empirical level, we aim to discover why large negative output gaps in Japan during the...

In many, if not most, econometric applications, it is impossible to estimate consistently the elements of the white-noise process or processes that underlie the DGP. A common example is a regression model with heteroskedastic and/or autocorrelated disturbances,where the heteroskedasticity and...

The fast double bootstrap can improve considerably on the single bootstrap when the bootstrapped statistic is approximately independent of the bootstrap DGP. This is because, among the approximations that underlie the fast double bootstrap (FDB), is the assumption of such independence. In this...