Forecasting macroeconomic data with Bayesian VARs: Sparse or dense? It depends!

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are widely applied when it comes to modeling and forecasting macroeconomic variables. In high dimensions, however, they are prone to overfitting. Bayesian methods—more concretely, shrinkage priors—have been shown to be successful at improving prediction performance. In the present paper, we introduce the semi-global framework, in which we replace the traditional global shrinkage parameter with group-specific shrinkage parameters. We show how this framework can be applied to various shrinkage priors, such as global–local priors and stochastic search variable selection priors. We demonstrate the virtues of the proposed framework in an extensive simulation study and in an empirical application forecasting data on the US economy. Further, we shed more light on the ongoing ‘illusion of sparsity’ debate, finding that forecasting performances under sparse/dense priors vary across evaluated economic variables and across time frames. Dynamic model averaging, however, can combine the merits of both worlds.