Measuring monetary policy with empirically grounded identifying restrictions

This article reevaluates the impulse response functions (IRFs) to a monetary policy shock of the structural vector autoregression (SVAR). Identifying restrictions are specified and justified based on empirical evidence,i.e., conditional independence relations of variables, which is an important dimension that a good model must be able to mimic. The empirical-based approach is able to significant narrow down the set of admissible causal orders to identify the IRFs to a monetary policy shock (from 2,482 to 8). I find that most of the qualitative “stylized” features reported in the literature remain intact. However, the quantitative predictions are much less certain than what is commonly perceived. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014