How much have the dynamics of US time series and in the particular the transmission of innovations to monetary policy instruments changed over the last century? The answers to these questions that this paper gives are "A lot." and "Probably less than you think.", respectively. We use vector...

The Great Depression provides a unique setting to test the impact of monetary policies on economic activity in a monetary union within the same country during a severe crisis. Until the mid-1930s, the 12 Federal Reserve banks had the ability to set their own discount rates and conduct...

We compile a new monthly database for each Federal Reserve district between 1923-33 to analyze the national and regional nature of the monetary transmission mechanism around the Great Depression. We employ sign-identified structural VARs and narrative sign restrictions informed by...

Should policymakers and applied macroeconomists worry about the difference between real-time and final data? We tackle this question by using a VAR with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility to show that the distinction between real-time data and final data matters for the impact of...

We propose a novel identification strategy of imposing sign restrictions directly on the impulse responses of a large set of variables in a Bayesian factor-augmented vector autoregression. We conceptualize and formalize conditions under which every additional sign restriction imposed can be...