Comparing stochastic volatility specifications for large Bayesian VARs

Common Drifting Volatility in Large Bayesian VARs∗

The general pattern of estimated volatilities of macroeconomic and financial variables is often broadly similar. We propose two models in which conditional volatilities feature comovement and study them using U.S. macroeconomic data. The first model specifies the conditional volatilities as driven by a single common unobserved factor, plus an idiosyncratic component. We label this model BVAR wi...

Forecasting with Medium and Large Bayesian VARs

This paper is motivated by the recent interest in the use of Bayesian VARs for forecasting, even in cases where the number of dependent variables is large. In such cases, factor methods have been traditionally used but recent work using a particular prior suggests that Bayesian VAR methods can forecast better. In this paper, we consider a range of alternative priors which have been used with sm...

Bayesian semiparametric stochastic volatility modeling

This paper extends the existing fully parametric Bayesian literature on stochastic volatility to allow for more general return distributions. Instead of specifying a particular distribution for the return innovations, nonparametric Bayesian methods are used to flexibly model the distribution’s skewness and kurtosis while volatility dynamics follow a parametric structure. Our Bayesian approach p...

[Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Volatility Models]: Comment

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Bayesian Analysis of a Stochastic Volatility Model