Large Hybrid Time-Varying Parameter VARs

Abstract

Time-varying parameter VARs with stochastic volatility are routinely used for structural analysis and forecasting in settings involving a few endogenous variables. Applying these models to high-dimensional datasets has proved to be challenging due to intensive computations and over-parameterization concerns. We develop an efficient Bayesian sparsification method for a class of models we call hybrid TVP-VARs—VARs with time-varying parameters in some equations but constant coefficients in others. Specifically, for each equation, the new method automatically decides whether the VAR coefficients and contemporaneous relations among variables are constant or time-varying. Using U.S. datasets of various dimensions, we find evidence that the parameters in some, but not all, equations are time varying. The large hybrid TVP-VAR also forecasts better than many standard benchmarks.

Keywords:

• Bayesian model averaging
• Large vector autoregression
• Macroeconomic forecasting
• Stochastic volatility
• Time-varying parameter

Supplementary Materials

The supplementary materials contain technical details on the estimation procedures, a description of the dataset and additional simulation and empirical results.