DP13613 Idiosyncratic shocks: a new procedure for identifying shocks in a VAR with application to the New Keynesian model

• Michael R. Wickens
23 Mar 2019

A key issue in VAR analysis is how best to identify economic shocks. The paper discusses the problems that the standard methods pose and proposes a new type of shock. Named an idiosyncratic shock, it is designed to identify the component in each VAR residual associated with the corresponding VAR variable. The procedure is applied to a calibrated New Keynesian model and to a VAR based on the same variables and using US data. The resulting impulse response functions are compared with those from standard procedures.