Should we use central bank asset purchase announcements and sign restrictions to quantify quantitative easing?
Roland von Campe
What the paper says
The empirical literature lacks a consensus on how to model quantitative easing (QE) within the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework. As agents may anticipate central bank balance-sheet variables, the use of asset purchase announcements has become a common practice. I show that results derived from such SVAR models, typically identified with sign restrictions, should be cautiously interpreted. Structural shocks deemed to identify QE give rise to spurious impulse response estimates. • This research letter revisits the use of asset purchase announcements by Weale and Wieladek (2016) to quantify quantitative easing. • Monte Carlo simulations and pre-QE sample evidence indicate that spurious results arise from this QE indicator. • The findings strongly suggest that the results of Weale and Wieladek (2016) are spurious.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.