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Principled Identification of Structural Dynamic Models

Published: December 18, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2512.17005v1

By: Neville Francis, Peter Reinhard Hansen, Chen Tong

We take a new perspective on identification in structural dynamic models: rather than imposing restrictions, we optimize an objective. This provides new theoretical insights into traditional Cholesky identification. A correlation-maximizing objective yields an Order- and Scale-Invariant Identification Scheme (OASIS) that selects the orthogonal rotation that best aligns structural shocks with their reduced-form innovations. We revisit a large number of SVAR studies and find, across 22 published SVARs, that the correlations between structural and reduced-form shocks are generally high.

Category
Economics:
Econometrics