Project description
New tools for macroeconomic research
Macroeconomists face a big challenge when trying to identify cause-and-effect relationships in the economy. The problem is that the economy is complex, with many factors influencing each other at the same time. Often, researchers rely on small variations in data to make conclusions, which can lead to fragile results. This makes it difficult to test theories and build confidence in the findings. In this context, the ERC-funded CreMac project aims to address these issues by developing new tools to work with data that is only weakly informative about the effects of macroeconomic policies. These tools will help researchers use data more efficiently and conduct more precise tests, leading to stronger and more reliable conclusions in macroeconomics.
Objective
Following the credibility revolution, macroeconomists have sought plausibly exogenous instruments and other sources of variation to identify causal effects. Given the complex nature of the macroeconomy, characterised by simultaneous causality and intemporal dependence, this is a high bar. Thus, in the pursuit of exogenous variation, researchers often use minor sources of variation or subtle features of the data to identify the effects of interest. When the variation exploited is modest, “weak identification” can arise. In practice, this means that estimators are no longer asymptotically normal, so standard techniques for statistical inference – conducting hypothesis tests or constructing confidence intervals – are invalid. While this likely occurs in much empirical research in macroeconomics, few papers acknowledge these issues, partially because there are rarely appealing options to address them. This proposal provides attractive options for researchers to combat weak identification in macroeconometric models. First, it offers the possibility to avoid weak identification in the first place, via novel frameworks to exploit instrumental variables in panel and time series data. These frameworks extract richer information from a given instrument and expand the set of admissible instruments. Next, I provide tools to construct confidence sets for dynamic causal effects, a key object of interest, that are valid regardless of how strong the identifying variation is. Existing approaches produce confidence sets that are conservative – too large. I first consider models identified using instrumental variables, improving both computational burden and performance relative to frontier methods. Finally, I consider models identified using more general sources of variation, and, working identification scheme by scheme, provide performance gains over leading methods for confidence sets. I thus facilitate credible inference to match credible identification strategies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicseconometrics
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsmacroeconomics
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
WC1E 6BT London
United Kingdom