Partially identified heteroskedastic SVARs

Abstract

This paper studies the identification of Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) exploiting a break in the variances of the structural shocks. Point-identification for this class of models relies on an eigen-decomposition involving the covariance matrices of reduced-form errors and requires that all the eigenvalues are distinct. This point-identification, however, fails in the presence of multiplicity of eigenvalues. This occurs in an empirically relevant scenario where, for instance, only a subset of structural shocks had the break in their variances, or where a group of variables shows a variance shift of the same amount. Together with zero or sign restrictions on the structural parameters and impulse responses, we derive the identified sets for impulse responses and show how to compute them. We perform inference on the impulse response functions, building on the robust Bayesian approach developed for set identified SVARs. To illustrate our proposal, we present an empirical example based on the literature on the global crude oil market where the identification is expected to fail due to multiplicity of eigenvalues.