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...

An introduction to vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis is given with special emphasis on cointegration. The models, estimating their parameters and specifying the autoregressive order, the cointegrating rank and other restrictions are discussed. Possibilities for model validation are also...