Essays on Identification in Macroeconomics

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three independent chapters on questions of identification and causal effect estimation in macroeconomics.

In the first chapter I propose a new method to estimate the aggregate effects of a large family of consumption and investment demand shocks. My approach has two steps: first, I recover direct partial equilibrium spending responses through cross-sectional variation, and second, I estimate the ``missing intercept'' of general equilibrium effects as the response of private spending to exogenous changes in aggregate public spending. I justify the second step through a formal demand equivalence result.

The second chapter revisits the classical question of monetary policy transmission. I show that the seemingly disparate findings of the recent empirical literature on the aggregate effects of monetary policy shocks are in fact all consistent with the same standard macro models. Taken together, empirical estimates paint a consistent picture of significant short-term stimulative effects of monetary easing.

In the third chapter, which is coauthored with Mikkel Plagborg-M{\o}ller, we prove that local projections (LPs) and Vector Autoregressions (VARs) estimate the same impulse responses. Our result implies that LP and VAR estimators are not conceptually separate procedures; instead, they belong to a spectrum of dimension reduction techniques with common estimand but different bias-variance properties. In particular, it follows that VAR-based structural estimation can equivalently be performed using LPs, and vice versa.