Sentiments in SVARs

This paper investigates the contribution of sentiments shocks to US fluctuations in a Structural VAR setup with long, medium and short run restrictions. Sentiments shocks are identified as shocks orthogonal to fundamentals that accounts for most of the variance of confidence. We assess our identification procedure from simulation experiments and show that it performs pretty well. From actual data, we obtain that, contrary to news shocks on total factor productivity, sentiments shocks explain very little of quantities and prices. Sentiments shocks mostly appear as an idiosyncratic component of confidence. These results are robust to various perturbations of the benchmark model