We propose a new approach to analyze economic shocks. Our new procedure identifies economic shocks as exogenous shifts in a function; hence, we call them "functional shocks." We show how to identify such shocks and how to trace their effects in the economy via VARs using "VARs with functional...

Structural VAR models are routinely estimated by Bayesian methods. Several recent studies have voiced concerns about the common use of posterior median (or mean) response functions in applied VAR analysis. In this paper, we show that these response functions can be misleading because in...

Existing proofs of the asymptotic validity of conventional methods of impulse response inference based on higher-order autoregressions are pointwise only. In this paper, we establish the uniform asymptotic validity of conventional asymptotic and bootstrap inference about individual impulse...