This work addresses passive reduction of structural vibration by means of shunted piezoelectric patches. The two classical resistive and resonant shunt solutions are considered. The main goal of this paper is to give closed-form solutions to systematically estimate the damping performances of the shunts, in the two cases of free and forced vibrations, whatever the elastic host structure is. Then it is carefully demonstrated that the performance of the shunt, in terms of vibration reduction, depends on only one free parameter: the so-called modal electromechanical coupling factor (MEMCF) of the mechanical vibration mode to which the shunts are tuned. Experiments are proposed and an excellent agreement with the model is obtained, thus validating it.