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Fast and Order-invariant Inference in Bayesian VARs with Non-Parametric Shocks

Florian Huber, Gary Koop

arXiv 26 May 2023 · Econometrics

arXiv:2305.16827 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

The shocks which hit macroeconomic models such as Vector Autoregressions (VARs) have the potential to be non-Gaussian, exhibiting asymmetries and fat tails. This consideration motivates the VAR developed in this paper which uses a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) to model the shocks. However, we do not follow the obvious strategy of simply modeling the VAR errors with a DPM since this would lead to computationally infeasible Bayesian inference in larger VARs and potentially a sensitivity to the way the variables are ordered in the VAR. Instead we develop a particular additive error structure inspired by Bayesian nonparametric treatments of random effects in panel data models. We show that this leads to a model which allows for computationally fast and order-invariant inference in large VARs with nonparametric shocks. Our empirical results with nonparametric VARs of various dimensions shows that nonparametric treatment of the VAR errors is particularly useful in periods such as the financial crisis and the pandemic.

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35
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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 et al (2019) Large Bayesian vector autoregressions with stochastic volatility and non-conjugate priors1.00063100%
2Chan et al (2021) Large Order-Invariant Bayesian VARs with Stochastic Volatility0.73732100%
3Arias et al Macroeconomic forecasting and variable ordering in multivariate stochastic volatility models0.64422100%
4Dunson and Xing (2009) Nonparametric Bayes Modeling of Multivariate Categorical Data0.64422100%
5Frühwirth-Schnatter et al (2004) Bayesian Analysis of the Heterogeneity Model0.64422100%
6Carriero et al (2022) Addressing COVID-19 outliers in BVARs with stochastic volatility0.64422100%
7Huber and Feldkircher (2019) Adaptive shrinkage in Bayesian vector autoregressive models self0.64422100%
8McCracken and Ng (2020) FRED-QD: A quarterly database for macroeconomic research0.5112250%
9Brown and Griffin (2010) Inference with normal-gamma prior distributions in regression problems0.51121100%
10Bhattacharya et al (2016) Fast sampling with Gaussian scale mixture priors in high-dimensional regression0.51121100%

Showing the top 10 of 35 scored citations.

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

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Bayesian modelling of VAR precision matrices using stochastic block networks\@thefnmark\@footnotetextWe would like to thank Luca Barbaglia, Sune Karlsson, James Mitchell, Luca Onorante, Michael Smith, Mike West as well as participants of the 13th European Seminar on Bayesian Econometrics (Glasgow, 2023), the yearly meeting of the Austrian Economic Association 2023 (Salzburg, 2023), the 6th Annual Workshop on Financial Econometrics (Örebro, 2023) and the 17th International Conference on Computational and Financial Econometrics (Berlin, 2023) for helfpul comments and suggestions. Huber and Scheckel gratefully acknowledge funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, grant no. ZK-35) and the Jubiläumsfond of the Oesterreischische Nationalbank (OeNB, grant no. JF-18740 and JF-18763)0.40511