Structural Var

John H. Cochrane

Commenting on Christina and David Romer's claim that active Federal Reserve policy ended postwar recessions, Cochrane argues that their historical narrative cannot distinguish a Fed that reacts to …

John W. Keating · Logan J. Kelly · A. Lee Smith · Victor J. Valcarcel

This 2019 Journal of Money, Credit and Banking paper by John Keating, Logan Kelly, A. Lee Smith, and Victor Valcarcel asks whether replacing the federal funds rate with Divisia M4 (DM4) -- a …

Luca Benati

Building on the finding that the velocity of M1 is, to a close approximation, the permanent component of short-term nominal interest rates, this paper proposes estimating the natural rate of interest …

Gary Koop · Dimitris Korobilis

This 2014 European Economic Review paper by Gary Koop and Dimitris Korobilis develops a time-varying-parameter factor-augmented VAR (TVP-FAVAR) with dynamic model averaging (DMA) to construct a …

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde · Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez · Thomas J. Sargent · Mark W. Watson

This 2007 American Economic Review paper by Fernández-Villaverde, Rubio-Ramírez, Sargent, and Watson asks when the structural economic shocks in a DSGE model's state-space representation can be …

Paolo Giordani

This 2004 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by Paolo Giordani offers an analytical and empirical alternative to the Sims (1992) forward-looking-information explanation of the "price puzzle" — the …

Olivier Blanchard · Roberto Perotti

This paper by Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti (QJE 2002; circulated from 1998) characterizes the dynamic effects of U.S. government spending and net tax shocks on output using a structural VAR …

V. V. Chari · Patrick J. Kehoe · Ellen R. McGrattan

Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan subject the popular structural-VAR (SVAR) procedure -- used by Gali (1999), Francis and Ramey (2005), and others to argue that technology shocks make hours fall, and …

Jean Boivin · Marc Giannoni

This 2002 FRBNY Economic Policy Review paper by Jean Boivin and Marc Giannoni asks whether the transmission of monetary policy shocks to U.S. output and inflation changed after the early 1980s, and if …

Lawrence J. Christiano · Martin Eichenbaum · Robert Vigfusson

Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Vigfusson ask whether structural VAR (SVAR) methods reliably recover the dynamic response of hours worked to an identified shock, by generating artificial data from a …

Valerie A. Ramey

Surveying theory, aggregate U.S. time-series evidence, and the newer cross-state/cross-locality literature on the government-spending multiplier, Ramey concludes that the multiplier for a temporary, …

James H. Stock · Mark W. Watson

This 2012 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity paper by James Stock and Mark Watson asks whether the unusual severity of the 2007-09 recession and the weakness of the recovery that followed required …

Òscar Jordà

This 2005 American Economic Review paper by Òscar Jordà introduces "local projections" (LP) — a way to estimate impulse responses directly from a sequence of single-horizon regressions of the future …

Nina Biljanovska · Francesco Grigoli · Martina Hengge

Economic policy uncertainty depresses growth in output, consumption and investment -- and about two-thirds of that effect comes from uncertainty originating in other countries rather than at home. …

Sophocles N. Brissimis · Nicholas S. Magginas

This 2006 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by Sophocles Brissimis and Nicholas Magginas asks whether augmenting a standard monetary VAR with forward-looking information can resolve the "price …

Valerie A. Ramey · Sarah Zubairy

Using a newly constructed quarterly US data set spanning 1889–2015 — built specifically to include the large wars and deep recessions that the post-WWII sample most of the literature relies on simply …

David O. Cushman · Tao Zha

This 1997 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by David Cushman and Tao Zha addresses the "exchange rate puzzle" and "price puzzle" that plague conventional recursive (Choleski) VAR studies of monetary …

Mikkel Plagborg-Møller · Christian K. Wolf

This 2022 Journal of Political Economy paper by Mikkel Plagborg-Møller and Christian K. Wolf asks what an external instrument (a proxy correlated with one structural shock and uncorrelated with the …

Neville Francis · Valerie A. Ramey

This 2005 *Journal of Monetary Economics* paper (circulated as NBER Working Paper 8726, January 2002) subjects a startling empirical result -- that identified "technology shocks" appear to *reduce* …

Atsushi Inoue · Lutz Kilian

This 2022 Journal of Econometrics paper by Atsushi Inoue and Lutz Kilian develops a Bayesian decision-theoretic framework for reporting inference about an entire vector of structural VAR impulse …

Andrea Carriero · Todd E. Clark · Massimiliano Marcellino

This 2019 Journal of Econometrics paper by Andrea Carriero, Todd Clark, and Massimiliano Marcellino develops a computationally efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating large …

Mikkel Plagborg-Møller · Christian K. Wolf

This 2021 Econometrica paper by Mikkel Plagborg-Møller and Christian K. Wolf proves that local-projection (LP) and vector-autoregression (VAR) based impulse-response estimators are, at the population …

Dake Li · Mikkel Plagborg-Møller · Christian K. Wolf

This 2024 Journal of Econometrics paper by Dake Li, Mikkel Plagborg-Møller, and Christian K. Wolf asks a purely practical question rather than proposing a new estimator or identification scheme: when …

Max Diegel · Dieter Nautz

This 2021 Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control paper by Max Diegel and Dieter Nautz asks whether U.S. long-term inflation expectations respond to monetary policy shocks in a way consistent with a …

Valerie A. Ramey

This 2016 Handbook of Macroeconomics chapter by Valerie Ramey surveys how macroeconomists identify structural shocks to monetary policy, fiscal policy, and technology, and how those shocks propagate …

Ben S. Bernanke · Ilian Mihov

Bernanke and Mihov (1998, QJE) address a measurement problem in the monetary-VAR literature: the era's dominant methods for extracting a "monetary policy shock" -- Cholesky orderings built around the …

Ben S. Bernanke · Jean Boivin · Piotr Eliasz

This 2005 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by Ben Bernanke, Jean Boivin, and Piotr Eliasz proposes the Factor-Augmented VAR (FAVAR) to address a specific problem with standard small monetary VARs: …

Alan J. Auerbach · Yuriy Gorodnichenko

This 2012 American Economic Journal: Economic Policy paper by Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko estimates how government spending multipliers vary with the state of the business cycle, using a …

Zhengyang Chen · Victor J. Valcarcel

This 2025 Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control paper by Zhengyang Chen and Victor J. Valcarcel proposes a "rational expectations structural VAR" (RE-SVAR) — a way to embed rational expectations …

Lawrence J. Christiano · Martin Eichenbaum · Charles L. Evans

This chapter in the 1999 Handbook of Macroeconomics (Volume 1) by Lawrence Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum, and Charles Evans surveys and unifies the VAR-based literature on identifying monetary policy …

Jonathan A. Parker

This 2011 *Journal of Economic Literature* forum essay by Jonathan Parker argues that as of early 2009 economists had no good measure of how government spending affects output specifically in a …

Thomas Drechsel

This paper combines a hand-collected archival data set of over 800 personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Federal Reserve officials from 1933 to 2016 with a narrative structural VAR to …

Robert E. Lucas, Jr.

Writing for the 30th anniversary of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's *A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960*, Lucas argues the book's lasting contribution is a normative one -- it …

John H. Cochrane

Surveying the evidence for monetary, technology, oil-price, and credit shocks as drivers of postwar U.S. business cycles, Cochrane finds that none of these popular observable candidates robustly …

José Luis Montiel Olea · Mikkel Plagborg-Møller

This 2019 Journal of Applied Econometrics paper by José Luis Montiel Olea and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller addresses a practical problem in applied time-series econometrics: which "simultaneous" (joint, …

Richard Clarida · Jordi Gali

This 1994 Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series paper by Richard Clarida and Jordi Galí asks how much of the variance of real exchange rates since the collapse of Bretton Woods is attributable to …

Paul Beaudry · Franck Portier

This 2006 *American Economic Review* paper (circulated as NBER Working Paper 10548, June 2004) develops a novel way to use the joint behavior of stock prices and measured total factor productivity …

John W. Keating

This 1992 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review paper (a policy review, not peer-reviewed) by John W.

Jordi Galí

Gali decomposes measured labor productivity and employment into a technology component and a non-technology ("demand") component, using a bivariate structural VAR identified by a single long-run …

Lucas Hafemann · Peter Tillmann

This 2020 International Journal of Central Banking paper by Lucas Hafemann and Peter Tillmann studies how ECB monetary policy transmits to the euro area as a whole and, separately, across individual …

David B. Gordon · Eric M. Leeper

This 1994 Journal of Political Economy paper by David B. Gordon and Eric M.

Lutz Kilian

This 2008 Journal of Economic Literature survey reviews the methodological developments that, in the author's view, have overturned the older consensus that oil and energy price shocks are simply …

Maurizio Michael Habib · Fabrizio Venditti

Decomposing a global risk factor built from stock returns in 63 economies into structural shocks, this paper finds that exogenous shifts in the financial sector's risk-bearing capacity matter more …

Jonas E. Arias · Dario Caldara · Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez

This 2019 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by Jonas Arias, Dario Caldara, and Juan Rubio-Ramírez proposes identifying monetary policy shocks in a structural VAR by placing sign and zero …

Giorgio E. Primiceri

This 2005 Review of Economic Studies paper by Giorgio Primiceri develops a Bayesian time-varying-parameter structural VAR (TVP-SVAR) with stochastic volatility — allowing not just the VAR coefficients …

Marco Del Negro · Giorgio E. Primiceri

This 2015 Review of Economic Studies corrigendum identifies and fixes a flaw in the Gibbs-sampling algorithm that Primiceri (2005) used to estimate time-varying-parameter structural VARs with …

Nathan S. Balke · Kenneth M. Emery

This 1994 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Economic Review paper by Nathan S. Balke and Kenneth M.

Jonas E. Arias · Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez · Daniel F. Waggoner

Structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) identified with sign restrictions are a widely used tool for estimating dynamic causal effects in macroeconomics. Critics—notably Baumeister and Hamilton …

Stephen D. Morris

This 2016 Economics Letters paper by Stephen D. Morris asks how concise the VARMA (vector autoregressive moving-average) representation of a DSGE model can be made, and whether the model's structural …

James H. Stock · Mark W. Watson

This 2001 Journal of Economic Perspectives paper by James Stock and Mark Watson reviews how vector autoregressions (VARs) have performed at the four core tasks of applied macroeconometrics — data …

Federico Ravenna

This 2007 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by Federico Ravenna asks a purely methodological question with direct consequences for structural VAR (SVAR) practice: under what conditions does a DSGE …

Harald Uhlig

This 2005 Journal of Monetary Economics paper by Harald Uhlig proposes an "agnostic" sign-restriction procedure for identifying monetary policy shocks in a VAR, designed to test rather than assume the …

John H. Cochrane

Even after monetary policy shocks are "correctly" identified in a VAR, Cochrane argues a further, purely theoretical identifying assumption -- whether anticipated money can affect output -- is needed …

Eric M. Leeper · Christopher A. Sims · Tao Zha

This 1996 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity paper by Eric Leeper, Christopher Sims, and Tao Zha asks what monetary policy actually does, and argues that the answer the identified-VAR literature …