Given the growing dissatisfaction with exclusion and long-run restrictions in structural vector autoregressive analysis, sign restrictions are becoming increasingly popular. So far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identified via such restrictions. Although in an ideal setting...

This paper extends the discussion of international comovements of actual inflation rates to inflation expectations. Financial market expectations about inflation rates in the United States (US) and Euro Area (EA) are modeled in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). We demonstrate how the...

Long run neutrality restrictions have been widely used to identify structural shocks in VAR models. This paper revisits the seminal paper by Blanchard and Quah (1989), and investigates their identification scheme. We use structural VAR models with smoothly changing covariances for identification...

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...

For forecasting and economic analysis many variables are used in logarithms (logs). In time series analysis this transformation is often considered to stabilize the variance of a series. We investigate under which conditions taking logs is beneficial for forecasting. Forecasts based on the...

Despite the fact that many aggregates are nonlinear functions and the aggregation weights of many macroeconomic aggregates are time-varying, much of the literature on forecasting aggregates considers the case of linear aggregates with fixed, time-invariant aggregation weights. In this study a...

A growing literature uses changes in residual volatility for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. A number of different models for heteroskedasticity or conditional heteroskedasticity are proposed and used in applications in this context. This study reviews the...

Changes in residual volatility in vector autoregressive (VAR) models can be used for identifying structural shocks in a structural VAR analysis. Testable conditions are given for full identification for the case where the volatility changes can be modelled by a multivariate GARCH process. Formal...

Long-run restrictions have been used extensively for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. Such restrictions are typically just-identifying but can be checked by utilizing changes in volatility. This paper reviews and contrasts the volatility models that have...

In impulse response analysis estimation uncertainty is typically displayed by constructing bands around estimated impulse response functions. These bands may be based on frequentist or Bayesian methods. If they are based on the joint distribution in the Bayesian framework or the joint asymptotic...