Two Gaussians, Too Many: A bootstrap-based approach to assess identifiability in non-Gaussian structural vector autoregressions
Normality pre-tests on reduced-form innovations cannot detect whether two or more underlying structural shocks are Gaussian, and hence cannot detect a failure of identification in non-Gaussian SVARs. We propose a bootstrap-based approach that reveals such a failure. Under the null of valid identification and certain regularity conditions, the conditional bootstrap distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator of the impact matrix is asymptotically normal, so the…