It is customary to suggest that the asymmetry in the transmission of oil price shocks to real output is well established. Much of the empirical work cited as being in support of asymmetries, however, has not directly tested the hypothesis of an asymmetric transmission of oil price innovations....

Are structural vector autoregressions (VARs) useful for discriminating between macro models‘ Recent assessments of VARs have shown that these statistical methods have adequate size properties. In other words, in simulation exercises, VARs will only infrequently reject the true data generating...

A common view in the literature is that the effect of energy price shocks on macroeconomic aggregates is asymmetric in energy price increases and decreases. We show that widely used asymmetric vector autoregressive models of the transmission of energy price shocks are misspecified, resulting in...