Measuring nonfundamentalness for structural VARs

Measuring Fiscal Shocks in Structural VARs Using Narrative Data

We describe a methodology that integrates the narrative approach to the identification of macroeconomic shocks into existing structural VAR settings while allowing for measurement error in the narrative measures of the shocks of interest. We apply our methodology to the fiscal VAR setup of Blanchard and Perotti (2002) and make use of the tax shocks constructed by Romer and Romer (2009). We find...

Structural Panel VARs

The paper proposes a structural approach to VAR analysis in panels, which takes into account responses to both idiosyncratic and common structural shocks, while permitting full cross member heterogeneity of the response dynamics. In the context of this structural approach, estimation of the loading matrices for the decomposition into idiosyncratic versus common shocks is straightforward and tra...

Testing for Sufficient Information in Structural VARs*

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a set of variables is informationally sufficient, i.e. it contains enough information to estimate the structural shocks with a VAR model. Based on such conditions, we suggest a procedure to test for informational sufficiency. Moreover, we show how to amend the VAR if informational sufficiency is rejected. We apply our procedure to a VAR ...

Efficient Inference in Non-Gaussian Structural VARs

Opening the Black Box: Structural Factor Models versus Structural VARs

In this paper we study identification in dynamic factor models and argue that factor models are better suited than VARs to provide a structural representation of the macroeconomy. Factor models distinguish measurement errors and other idiosyncratic disturbances from structural macroeconomic shocks. As a consequence, the number of structural shocks is no longer equal to the number of variables i...