A Structural Approach to Growth-at-Risk

Abstract: We identify the structural impulse responses of quantiles of the outcome variable to a shock. Our estimation strategy explicitly distinguishes treatment from control variables, allowing us to model responses of unconditional quantiles while using controls for identification. Disentangling the effect of adding control variables on identification versus interpretation brings our structural quantile impulse responses conceptually closer to structural mean impulse responses. Applying our methodology to study the impact of financial shocks on lower quantiles of output growth confirms that financial shocks have an outsized effect on growth-at-risk, but the magnitude of our estimates is more extreme than in previous studies.