ASYMPTOTIC NORMAL AND BOOTSTRAP INFERENCE IN STRUCTURAL VAR ANALYSIS

The aim of the paper is to examine the performance of bootstrap and as ymptotic parametric inference methods in structural VAR analysis. The results obtained through a Monte Carlo experiment suggest that the two approaches are largely equivalent in most, but not all, cases. While the asymptotic method turns out to be surprisingly robust with respect to the distribution of the errors, the bootstrap does deliver results superior in terms of both length of the confidence interval and cover age when highly non-linear statistics (such as the components of the v ariance of the forecast error) are considered.