Agnostic structural disturbances (ASDs): detecting and reducing misspecification in empirical macroeconomic models

Wouter J. Den Haan and Thomas Drechsel

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Exogenous random structural disturbances are the main driving force behind fluctuations in most business cycle models and typically a wide variety is used. This paper documents that a minor misspecification regarding structural disturbances can lead to large distortions for parameter estimates and implied model properties, such as impulse response functions with a wrong shape and even an incorrect sign. We propose a novel concept, namely an agnostic structural disturbance (ASD), that can be used to both detect and correct for misspecification of the structural disturbances. In contrast to regular disturbances and wedges, ASDs do not impose additional restrictions on policy functions. When applied to the Smets-Wouters (SW) model, we find that its risk-premium disturbance and its investment-specific productivity disturbance are rejected in favor of our ASDs. While agnostic in nature, studying the estimated associated coefficients and the impulse response functions of these ASDs allows us to interpret them economically as a risk-premium/preference and an investment-specific productivity type disturbance as in SW, but our results indicate that they enter the model quite differently than the original SW disturbances. Our procedure also selects an additional wage mark-up disturbance that is associated with increased capital efficiency.

Keywords: DSGE; full-information model estimation; structural disturbances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C52 E30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-08-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ets and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/90384/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Agnostic Structural Disturbances (ASDs): Detecting and reducing misspecification in empirical macroeconomic models (2021)
Working Paper: Agnostic structural disturbances (ASDs): detecting and reducing misspecification in empirical macroeconomic models (2020)
Working Paper: Agnostic Structural Disturbances (ASDs): Detecting and Reducing Misspecification in Empirical Macroeconomic Models (2018)
Working Paper: Agnostic Structural Disturbances (ASDs): Detecting and Reducing Misspecification in Empirical Macroeconomic Models (2018)
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