Lasse Bork () (Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus,and CREATES)
Abstract
Economy-wide effects of shocks to the US federal funds rate are estimated in a state space model with 120 US macroeconomic and financial time series driven by the dynamics of the federal funds rate and a few dynamic factors. This state space system is denoted a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) by Bernanke et al. (2005). I estimate the FAVAR by the fully parametric one-step EM algorithm as an alternative to the two-step principal component method and the one-step Bayesian method in Bernanke et al. (2005). The EM algorithm which is an iterative maximum likelihood method estimates all the parameters and the dynamic factors simultaneously and allows for classical inference. I demonstrate empirically that the same impulse responses but better fit emerge robustly from a low order FAVAR with eight correlated factors compared to a high order FAVAR with fewer correlated factors, for instance four factors. This empirical result accords with one of the theoretical results from Bai & Ng (2007) in which it is shown that the information in complicated factor dynamics may be substituted by panel information.
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Paper provided by School of Economics and Management, University of Aarhus in its series CREATES Research Papers with number
2009-11.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Determination of Interest Rates; Term Structure of Interest Rates E51 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Money Supply; Credit; Money Multipliers E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy C33 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Models with Panel Data
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Marta Banbura & Domenico Giannone & Lucrezia Reichlin, 2008.
"Large Bayesian VARs,"
ECARES Working Papers
2008_033, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Ecares.
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