Policy Evaluation with Sufficient Macro Statistics — A Primer —

Impulse responses and forecasts are central concepts for policy makers. They are also sufficient statistics to solve many important macroeconomic problems, from policy counterfactuals to policy evaluation, and they offer a promising alternative to the standard structural modeling approach. In this work, we discuss and extend recent progress on the use of these sufficient macro statistics for policy evaluation. We illustrate the methods by evaluating the performance of the ECB over 1999-2023.