EconBase
← All papers

Comparing Stochastic Volatility Specifications for Large Bayesian VARs

Joshua C. C. Chan

arXiv 28 Aug 2022 · Econometrics · publishedJournal of Econometrics (2022) · 37 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2208.13255 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Large Bayesian vector autoregressions with various forms of stochastic volatility have become increasingly popular in empirical macroeconomics. One main difficulty for practitioners is to choose the most suitable stochastic volatility specification for their particular application. We develop Bayesian model comparison methods -- based on marginal likelihood estimators that combine conditional Monte Carlo and adaptive importance sampling -- to choose among a variety of stochastic volatility specifications. The proposed methods can also be used to select an appropriate shrinkage prior on the VAR coefficients, which is a critical component for avoiding over-fitting in high-dimensional settings. Using US quarterly data of different dimensions, we find that both the Cholesky stochastic volatility and factor stochastic volatility outperform the common stochastic volatility specification. Their superior performance, however, can mostly be attributed to the more flexible priors that accommodate cross-variable shrinkage.

Citation extraction

84
references
137
in-text mentions
84
distinct cited
4
self-citations
15,201
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_titled_section at “Appendix A: Estimation Details” · 54% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Carriero, Clark, and Marcellino (2015) Bayesian VARs: Specification Choices and Forecast Accuracy1.00053100%
2Carriero, Clark, and Marcellino (2016) Common drifting volatility in large Bayesian VARs1.00053100%
3Chan (2021) Minnesota-type adaptive hierarchical priors for large Bayesian VARs self0.9285380%
4Giannone, Lenza, and Primiceri (2015) Prior selection for vector autoregressions0.92843100%
5Chan (2020) Large Bayesian VARs: A Flexible Kronecker Error Covariance Structure self0.8558562%
6Chan and Eisenstat (2015) Marginal Likelihood Estimation with the Cross-Entropy Method0.8115280%
7Carriero, Clark, and Marcellino (2019) Large Bayesian vector autoregressions with stochastic volatility and non-conjugate priors0.81142100%
8Chan and Eisenstat (2018) Bayesian Model Comparison for Time-Varying Parameter VARs with Stochastic Volatility0.73732100%
9Kastner (2019) Sparse Bayesian time-varying covariance estimation in many dimensions0.73732100%
10Carriero, Clark, Marcellino, and Mertens (2022) Addressing COVID-19 outliers in BVARs with stochastic volatility0.64441100%

Showing the top 10 of 84 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Assessing the Effects of Monetary Shocks on Macroeconomic Stars: A SMUC-IV Framework0.87452
2BVARs and Stochastic Volatility0.73732
3What drives the European carbon market? Macroeconomic factors and forecasts0.73732
4Bayesian Dynamic Factor Models for High-Dimensional Matrix-Valued Time Series0.73732
5Large Bayesian Tensor VARs with Stochastic Volatility0.64422
6Large Bayesian Tensor Autoregressions0.64422
7Forecasting macroeconomic data with Bayesian VARs: Sparse or dense? It depends!0.40511
8Bayesian Modeling of TVP-VARs Using Regression Trees0.40511
9High-Dimensional Conditionally Gaussian State Space Models with Missing Data0.40511
10Minnesota BART0.40511