This paper discusses the paper The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

This paper estimates the quarterly flow of migrants to the US working age population using data based on the Current Population Survey (CPS). The dynamic responses to immigration shocks are estimated in a vector autoregression. Immigration shocks, as well as technology shocks are identified...

We analyse the accuracy of an econometric model for nowcasting GDP growth in a true real-time setting. The analysis is based on a unique sample of nowcasts that were produced in real time and stored. Our results support the use of econometric models for nowcasting because the accuracy of these...

Past empirical research on monetary policy in open economies has found evidence of the 'delayed overshooting', the 'forward discount' and the 'exchange rate' puzzles. We revisit the effects of monetary policy on exchange rates by applying Uhlig's (2005) identification procedure that involves...

Since Christopher Sims's Macroeconomics and Reality" (1980), macroeconomists have used structural VARs, or vector autoregressions, for policy analysis. Constructing the impulseresponse functions and variance decompositions that are central to this literature requires factoring the...

This study investigates the effects of a monetary policy shock on real output and prices, by means of a novel distribution-free nonrecursive identification scheme for structural vector autoregressions. Structural shocks are assumed to be mutually independent. The identification procedure is...

It is well documented in the literature that identified vector autoregression (VAR) models often produce puzzling results when the effect of unexpected monetary policy movements is estimated. Many authors find that raising interest rate generates protracted appreciation of the exchange rate (the...

The interest in empirical studies of monetary policy has increased in the last decade. The deregulation of financial markets and the increased use of explicit policy rules and targets have made monetary policy more transparent and interesting for economic analysis. This paper demonstrates how a...

There are many indications that formal methods are not used to their full potential by central banks today. In this paper we demonstrate how BVAR and DSGE models can be used to shed light on questions that policy makers deal with in practice using data from Sweden. We compare the forecast...