Common Components Structural VARs

Mario Forni, Luca Gambetti, Marco Lippi and Luca Sala

Center for Economic Research (RECent) from University of Modena and Reggio E., Dept. of Economics "Marco Biagi"

Abstract: Small scale VAR models are subject to two major issues: first, the information set might be too narrow; second, many macroeconomic variables are measured with error. The two features produce distorted estimates of the impulse response functions. We propose a new procedure, called Common Components Structural VARs (CC-SVAR), which solves both problems. It consists in (a) treating the variables, prior to estimation, in order to extract their common components; this eliminates measurement errors; (b) estimating a VAR with m > q common components, that is a singular VAR, where q is the number of shocks driving the economy; this solves the fundamentalness problem. SVARs and CC-SVARs are compared in the empirical analysis of monetary policy and technology shocks. The results obtained by SVARs are not robust, in that they strongly depend on the choice and the treatment of the variables considered. On the contrary, using CCSVARs (i) contractionary monetary shocks produce a decrease of prices independently of the variables included in the model, (ii) irrespective of whether hours worked enter the model in log-levels or growth rates, technology improvements produce an increase in hours worked.

Keywords: Structural VAR models; structural factor models; nonfundamentalness; measurement errors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages 45
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm, nep-ets, nep-mac and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://155.185.68.2/Recentpaper/recent-wp147.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Common Component Structural VARs (2020)
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:mod:recent:147

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for Economic Research (RECent) from University of Modena and Reggio E., Dept. of Economics "Marco Biagi" Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().