It is emphasized that the shocks in structural vector autoregressions are only identified up to sign and it is pointed out that this feature can result in very misleading confidence intervals for impulse responses if simulation methods such as Bayesian or bootstrap methods are used. The...

We introduce a simple nonparametric approach to compute impulse response functions. We first search for clusters of recurrent patterns of observations resembling two sets of given initial conditions, one of which contains the impact effect of the structural shock of interest. Then, to trace out...