A Tale of a Tool: The Impact of Sims’s Vector Autoregressions on Macroeconometrics

This article assesses the impact of Christopher Sims’s VARs upon the evolution of contemporary macroeconometrics within the contentious context of the new classical revolution. We argue that the decision of using VARs was not an all-or-nothing affair, but the outcome of the evolving interaction of tools, theories, and researchers, within an overall process of learning by modifying. Using citation and cocitation networks, extracting algorithms and semantic networks, we found evidence that confirms the unfolding of an interdependent and collective evolution of the impact of Sims’s VARs, and the emergence of new groupings of most cocited articles at the interface of macroeconometrics and monetary policy analysis, revealing how the practice of macroeconometrics changed in the interim.