Measuring International Uncertainty Using Global Vector Autoregressions with Drifting Parameters

Download or read book Measuring International Uncertainty Using Global Vector Autoregressions with Drifting Parameters written by Michael Pfarrhofer and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the time-varying impacts of international macroeconomic uncertainty shocks. We use a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) specification with drifting coefficients and factor stochastic volatility in the errors to model six economies jointly. The measure of uncertainty is constructed endogenously by estimating a scalar driving the innovation variances of the latent factors, and is included also in the mean of the process. To achieve regularization, we use Bayesian techniques for estimation, and introduce a set of hierarchical global-local shrinkage priors. The adopted priors center the model on a constant parameter specification with homoscedastic errors, but allow for time-variation if suggested by likelihood information. Moreover, we assume coefficients across economies to be similar, but provide sufficient flexibility via the hierarchical prior for country-specific idiosyncrasies. The results point towards pronounced real and financial effects of uncertainty shocks in all countries, with differences across economies and over time.