Large Bayesian VARs with Factor Stochastic Volatility: Identification, Order Invariance and Structural Analysis

Abstract: Vector autoregressions (VARs) with multivariate stochastic volatility are widely used for structural analysis. Often the structural model identified through economically meaningful restrictions--e.g., sign restrictions--is supposed to be independent of how the dependent variables are ordered. But since the reduced-form model is not order invariant, results from the structural analysis depend on the order of the variables. We consider a VAR based on the factor stochastic volatility that is constructed to be order invariant. We show that the presence of multivariate stochastic volatility allows for statistical identification of the model. We further prove that, with a suitable set of sign restrictions, the corresponding structural model is point-identified. An additional appeal of the proposed approach is that it can easily handle a large number of dependent variables as well as sign restrictions. We demonstrate the methodology through a structural analysis in which we use a 20-variable VAR with sign restrictions to identify 5 structural shocks.