Structural Interpretation of Vector Autoregressions with Incomplete Identification: Revisiting the Role of Oil Supply and Demand Shocks: Comment

Lutz Kilian and Xiaoqing Zhou

No 7166, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Recently, Baumeister and Hamilton (henceforth: BH) have argued that existing studies of the global oil market fail to account for uncertainty about their identifying assumptions. They recommend an alternative econometric approach intended to address this concern by formulating priors on the structural model parameters. We demonstrate that in practice BH are unable to parameterize identification uncertainty without falling back on ad hoc prior specifications. They are also unable to show that earlier studies did not impose all relevant identifying information. In fact, to the extent that BH’s substantive conclusions differ from earlier studies, these differences do not reflect their use of a superior econometric methodology, but mainly the imposition of a highly unrealistic prior for the global impact price elasticity of oil supply. Once identification uncertainty about the global price elasticity of oil supply is accounted for by specifying a prior more in line with extraneous evidence and economic theory, the substantive results of earlier oil market studies are reaffirmed. We also refute BH’s claim that existing oil market studies are invalid or not robust. Finally, we explain why the BH method is not a strict generalization of existing methods. It is, in fact, not designed to be applied to state-or-the-art oil market models because key assumptions of the proposed approach are not met in these models.

Keywords: oil market models; structural VAR; identification; oil supply elasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 E32 Q43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7166.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7166

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().