Bayesian Inference on Structural Impulse Response Functions Mikkel Plagborg-Møller∗ This version: August 26, 2016. First version: October 26, 2015. Abstract: I propose to estimate structural impulse responses from macroeco- nomic time series by doing Bayesian inference on the Structural Vector Moving Average representation of the data. This approach has two advantages over Struc- tural Vector Autoregressions. First, it imposes prior information directly on the impulse responses in a flexible and transparent manner. Second, it can handle noninvertible impulse response functions, which are often encountered in appli- cations. Rapid simulation of the posterior of the impulse responses is possible using an algorithm that exploits the Whittle likelihood. The impulse responses are partially identified, and I derive the frequentist asymptotics of the Bayesian procedure to show which features of the prior information are updated by the data. The procedure is used to estimate the effects of technological news shocks on the U.S. business cycle. Keywords: Bayesian inference, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, impulse response function, news shock, nonfundamental, noninvertible, partial identification, structural vector autoregression, structural vector moving average, Whittle likelihood. 1 Introduction Since Sims(1980), Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) analysis has been the most popular method for estimating the impulse response functions (IRFs) of observed macro ∗Harvard University, email:
[email protected]. I am grateful for comments from Isaiah An- drews, Regis Barnichon, Varanya Chaubey, Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Peter Ganong, Ben Hébert, Christian Matthes, Pepe Montiel Olea, Frank Schorfheide, Elie Tamer, Harald Uhlig, and seminar participants at Cambridge, Chicago Booth, Columbia, Harvard Economics and Kennedy School, MIT, Penn State, Prince- ton, UCL, UPenn, and the 2015 DAEiNA meeting.