A0676
Title: Measuring nonfundamentalness for structural VARs
Authors: Stefano Soccorsi - Department of Economics, Lancaster University Management School (United Kingdom) [presenting]
Abstract: As nonfundamental vector moving averages do not have causal VAR representations, standard structural VAR methods are deemed inappropriate for recovering the economic shocks of general equilibrium models with nonfundamental reduced forms. In previous literature it has been pointed out that, despite nonfundamentalness, structural VARs may still be good approximating models. I characterize nonfundamentalness as bias depending on the zeros of moving average filters. However, measuring the nonfundamental bias is not trivial because of the simultaneous occurrence of lag truncation bias. I propose a method to disentangle the bias based on population spectral density and derive a measure for the nonfundamental bias in population. In the application, I find that the SVAR exercises of Sims (2012) are accurate because the nonfundamental bias is mild.
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