The effects of monetary policy on brazilian product: empirical evidence using signs restrictions

This study aims to examine the effects of monetary policy shocks on quarterly GDP and monthly industrial production in Brazil, from 1995 to 2010. The method employed was Vectors Autoregression (VAR), as proposed by Uhlig (2005), which allows the dynamics of GDP and industrial production to freely adjust to the remaining variables' sign restrictions. The results show that shocks to the monetary policy variable produce effects of greater intensity when compared to previous studies. The historical variance decomposition shows that shocks have kept GDP below its trend during the period 1996-2002, whereas in the case of industrial product, this pattern occurs throughout the entire studying period.