Sequential Identification of Technological News Shocks

In an influential recent paper, Beaudry and Portier (2006) propose a sequential approach for identifying technological news shocks. Thereby, the correlation coefficient between news shocks of a short-run identification scheme and technology shocks of a long-run identification scheme in the VAR framework measures the extent to which news incorporated into forward-looking variables could reflect future technological developments. While structural VARs can potentially provide a useful guide for modelers as well as policy-makers, the ability of such models to recuperate structural shocks in general and news shocks in particular from the data is a contentious issue in the literature. In the current paper, I find by means of Monte Carlo simulations that the sequential approach can be quite successful in recuperating technological news shocks from artificial data.

Seymen, Atilim (2013), Sequential Identification of Technological News Shocks, ZEW Discussion Paper No. 13-111, Mannheim.