Monetary Policy Transmission in Italy: A BVAR Analysis with Sign Restriction

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian VAR model to examine the short term effects of monetary policy shocks on the Italian economy. Firstly, our BVAR model uses the Cholesky decomposition to identify four kinds of macroeconomic shocks, namely, supply, demand, interest rate and monetary shocks. Then, from the theoretical model, we derive and impose a minimum set of robust sign restrictions to identify the transmission mechanism of monetary tightening. The outcomes from the sign identification confirm the micro evidence on inflation persistence. Moreover, our results show a greater persistence of inflation to monetary restriction than Cholesky identification presents. Overall, we find that a monetary innovation brings a decline of 30 basis point of GDP, this result is almost invariant across both prior and identification technique.