Impulse Response Estimation by Smooth Local Projections

Régis Barnichon and Christian Brownlees

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2019, vol. 101, issue 3, 522-530

Abstract: Local projections (LP) is a popular methodology for the estimation of impulse responses (IR). Compared to the traditional VAR approach, LP allow for more flexible IR estimation by imposing weaker assumptions on the dynamics of the data. The nonparametric nature of LP comes at an efficiency cost, and in practice, the LP estimator may suffer from excessive variability. In this work, we propose an IR estimation methodology based on B-spline smoothing called smooth local projections (SLP). The SLP approach preserves the flexibility of standard LP, can substantially increase precision, and is straightforward to implement. A simulation study shows that SLP can deliver substantial gains in IR estimation over LP. We illustrate our technique by studying the effects of monetary shocks where we highlight how SLP can easily incorporate commonly employed structural identification strategies.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (98)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest_a_00778 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Impulse Response Estimation By Smooth Local Projections (2016)
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:tpr:restat:v:101:y:2019:i:3:p:522-530

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().