We compare two approaches to using information about the signs of structural shocks at specific dates within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR): imposing ‘narrative restrictions’ (NR) on the shock signs in an otherwise set-identified SVAR; and casting the information about the shock signs as a discrete-valued ‘narrative proxy’ (NP) to point-identify the impulse responses.
We consider a situation where the distribution of a random variable is being estimated by the empirical distribution of noisy measurements of that variable.