Related papers: Opening the Black Box of Local Projections
We study policy counterfactuals that impose path restrictions on a policy instrument over a finite window. Under a sequential intervention design, we define two counterfactual objects, policy-peg impulse responses and policy-path effects,…
What should applied macroeconomists know about local projection (LP) and vector autoregression (VAR) impulse response estimators? The two methods share the same estimand, but in finite samples lie on opposite ends of a bias-variance…
Applied macroeconomists often compute confidence intervals for impulse responses using local projections, i.e., direct linear regressions of future outcomes on current covariates. This paper proves that local projection inference robustly…
State-dependent local projections (LPs) are widely used to estimate how impulse responses to exogenous aggregate shocks vary as a function of observable state variables, yet their causal interpretation remains unclear. We show that LPs…
A local projection is a statistical framework that accounts for the relationship between an exogenous variable and an endogenous variable, measured at different time points. Local projections are often applied in impulse response analyses…
We develop a Bayesian framework for the efficient estimation of impulse responses using Local Projections (LPs) with instrumental variables. It accommodates multiple shocks and instruments, accounts for autocorrelation in multi-step…
This paper presents a comprehensive local projections (LP) framework for estimating future responses to current shocks, robust to high-dimensional controls without relying on sparsity assumptions. The approach is applicable to various…
We propose a clustered local projection (clustered LP) method to estimate impulse response functions in a class of time-varying models where parameter variation is linked to a low-dimensional matrix of observables. We show that the…
We use quadratic vector autoregressions, motivated by pruned second-order perturbation solutions to DSGE models, as a laboratory to evaluate how well popular local projection (LP) specifications recover true impulse responses in nonlinear…
Machine learning predictions are typically interpreted as the sum of contributions of predictors. Yet, each out-of-sample prediction can also be expressed as a linear combination of in-sample values of the predicted variable, with weights…
As machine learning becomes an important part of many real world applications affecting human lives, new requirements, besides high predictive accuracy, become important. One important requirement is transparency, which has been associated…
Inference for impulse responses estimated with local projections presents interesting challenges and opportunities. Analysts typically want to assess the precision of individual estimates, explore the dynamic evolution of the response over…
This paper introduces a flexible local projection that generalizes the model by Jord\'a (2005) to a non-parametric setting using Bayesian Additive Regression Trees. Monte Carlo experiments show that our BART-LP model is able to capture…
In this paper, we estimate impulse responses by local projections in high-dimensional settings. We use the desparsified (de-biased) lasso to estimate the high-dimensional local projections, while leaving the impulse response parameter of…
Modern deep learning models for NLP are notoriously opaque. This has motivated the development of methods for interpreting such models, e.g., via gradient-based saliency maps or the visualization of attention weights. Such approaches aim to…
We conduct a simulation study of Local Projection (LP) and Vector Autoregression (VAR) estimators of structural impulse responses across thousands of data generating processes, designed to mimic the properties of the universe of U.S.…
Local projections (LP) and vector autoregressions (VAR) are the two standard tools for impulse response analysis, but they often display a finite-sample trade-off: LP is typically less biased but more volatile, while VAR is more precise but…
This paper studies state-dependent local projections (LPs). First, I establish a general characterization of their estimand: under minimal assumptions, state-dependent LPs recover weighted averages of causal effects. This holds for…
Black box systems for automated decision making, often based on machine learning over (big) data, map a user's features into a class or a score without exposing the reasons why. This is problematic not only for lack of transparency, but…
Applied macroeconomists frequently use impulse response estimators motivated by linear models. We study whether the estimands of such procedures have a causal interpretation when the true data generating process is in fact nonlinear. We…