Exogenous measures of monetary policy shocks, directly derived from financial market information, are used in close (U.S.) and open (U.S.-Germany) economy VAR models to evaluate the robustness of the dynamic effect of monetary policy obtained from traditional identified VAR. The empirical...

A fiscal shock due to a shift in taxes or in government spending will, at some point in time, constrain the future path of taxes and spending, since the government's intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in analyses of the...