Monetary conservatism and fiscal policy

Does an inflation conservative central bank à la Rogoff (1985) remain desirable in a setting with endogenous fiscal policy? To provide an answer we study monetary and fiscal policy games without commitment in a dynamic, stochastic sticky-price economy with monopolistic distortions. Monetary policy determines nominal interest rates and fiscal policy provides public goods generating private utility. We find that lack of fiscal commitment gives rise to excessive public spending. The optimal inflation rate internalizing this distortion is positive, but lack of monetary commitment generates too much inflation. A conservative monetary authority thus remains desirable. When fiscal policy is determined before monetary policy each period, the monetary authority should focus exclusively on stabilizing inflation. Monetary conservatism then eliminates the steady state biases associated with lack of monetary and fiscal commitment and leads to stabilization policy that is close to optimal.     

通货膨胀目标制理论与实证研究综述

通货膨胀目标制是20世纪90年代开始实施的一种新型的货币政策理论,各国金融经济学家们对这种新的理论框架开展了大量的理论和实证研究.通货膨胀目标制通过钉住通货膨胀可以减低通货膨胀预期、增强中央银行透明度和责任度,从而提高货币政策和中央银行的可信度,这对新兴市场和转型国家的宏观经济发展和货币政策目标的选择具有一定的借鉴意义.     

Generalized Stability of Monetary Unions Under Regime Switching in Monetary and Fiscal Policies

Earlier studies on the stability of monetary unions show that an inflation‐targeting central bank imposes strict budgetary requirements on fiscal policy to obtain a unique stable equilibrium. Failure of only one fiscal authority to meet these requirements already results in nonexistence of equilibrium. Nevertheless, it might prove useful to temporarily depart from such requirements in order to absorb country‐specific shocks. We show that such departures are feasible if fiscal authorities commit to switch to more sustainable fiscal regimes in the future. Debt devaluation and fiscal bailouts may also broaden the range of policy stances under which monetary unions are stable.     

Fiscal Dominance and Inflation Targeting: Lessons from Turkey

In the aftermath of the 2000-2001 crisis in Turkey, the banking sector was in turbulence, requiring immediate action. The rescue operation significantly increased the public debt ratio with respect to gross domestic product. At the beginning of 2002, the central bank of Turkey announced that it was going to implement an implicit inflation-targeting regime. The fiscal dominance caused by the high debt ratio severely constrained the conduct of monetary policy. Other obstacles to the conduct of monetary policy included a high level of exchange rate pass-through, inflation inertia, and a weak banking sector. This paper offers an account of the monetary policy experience of Turkey in the postcrisis period and provides lessons for policymakers in other emerging markets.     

A happy “half way-house”? Medium term inflation targeting in New Zealand

The 2002 Policy Targets Agreement (PTA) between the government and central bank of New Zealand asks the central bank to target inflation “over the medium term” rather than over an annual target. Delegating such a medium term objective to the central bank shifts inflation targeting towards a “halfway-house” between inflation targeting and price level targeting. We show empirically that this helps time consistent policy approximate the first-best commitment policy even when the government asks the central bank to weight output stabilisation differently to society. We estimate the New Zealand economy with a small open economy DSGE model and show that the happiest halfway house is located around a two year averaging horizon at most, which leads to mild improvements in monetary policy efficiency.     

央行财政存款缴存管理与货币政策执行效果的思考--以广西为例

金融机构缴存的财政存款作为中央银行的资金来源之一,对中央银行实施货币政策进行宏观调控具有重要作用。本文通过对近年来金融机构在人民银行缴存财政存款存在问题的分析,阐述其对银行体系流动性管理的影响,以及对央行货币政策执行效果的间接影响。因此,应通过加强对财政性存款缴存的管理,将财政政策和货币政策调控手段紧密结合,以提高货币政策执行效果。     

Political monetary cycles and a de facto ranking of central bank independence

Political monetary cycles are less likely to occur in countries with independent central banks. Independent central banks can withstand political pressure to stimulate the economy before elections or finance election-related increases in government spending. Based on this logic and supporting evidence, we construct a de facto ranking of central bank independence derived from the extent to which monetary policy varies with the electoral cycle. The ranking avoids well-known problems with existing measures of central bank independence and provides independent information about average inflation and inflation volatility differences across countries.     

Discount Rates,Debt Maturity,and the Fiscal Theory

This paper examines how the transmission of government portfolio risk arising from maturity operations depends on the stance of monetary/fiscal policy. Accounting for risk premia in the fiscal theory allows the government portfolio to affect expected inflation, even in a frictionless economy. The effects of maturity rebalancing on expected inflation in the fiscal theory depend directly on the conditional nominal term premium, giving rise to an optimal debt-maturity policy that is state-dependent. In a calibrated macrofinance model, we demonstrate that maturity operations have sizable effects on expected inflation and output through our novel risk transmission mechanism.     

Fiscal-monetary policy interactions in the presence of unionized labor markets

This paper develops a framework for studying the interactions between labor unions, fiscal policy, monetary policy and monopolistically competitive firms. The framework is used to investigate the effects of labor taxes, the replacement ratio, labor market institutions and monetary policymaking institutions on economic peformance in the presence of strategic interactions between labor unions and the central bank. Given fiscal variables, higher levels of either centralization of wage bargaining, or of central bank conservativeness are associated with lower unemployment and inflation. However the forward shifting of changes in either labor taxes or in unemployment benefits to labors costs is larger the higher are those institutional variables. The paper also considers the effects of those institutions on the choice of labor taxes and of unemployment benefits by governments concerned with the costs of inflation and unemployment, as well as with redistribution to particular constituencies. A main result is that, normally, higher levels of centralization and conservativeness induce government to set higher labor taxes. JEL Classification: E5 · E6 · H2 · J3 · J5 · L1     

对冲政策的工具选择与特别国债发行

对冲政策是目前货币政策的核心问题。外汇储备增加速度不断加快,导致因基础货币投放增加过快而引起的潜在通货膨胀不断积累,中央银行因此采取的对冲政策和采用的对冲工具关系到中国经济稳定健康的发展。财政部发行的特别国债对流动性的影响是中性的,但无疑为中央银行提供了一个有效的对冲工具。     

Time Inconsistency and Free‐Riding in a Monetary Union

In monetary unions, a time inconsistency problem in monetary policy leads to a novel type of free‐rider problem in the setting of non‐monetary policies. The free‐rider problem leads union members to pursue lax non‐monetary policies that induce the monetary authority to generate high inflation. Free‐riding can be mitigated by imposing constraints on non‐monetary policies. Without a time inconsistency problem, the union has no free‐rider problem; then constraints on non‐monetary policies are unnecessary and possibly harmful. This theory is here detailed and applied to several non‐monetary policies: labor market policy, fiscal policy, and bank regulation.     

Inflation,Employment, and Monetary Policy: Objectives and Outcomes in the UK and U.S. Compared

This paper explores how sensitive is monetary policy to the precise preferences of the central bank over inflation and economic activity. It does so in order to address a puzzle—which is that the U.S. Fed and the Bank of England appear to have quite different objectives and yet have adopted strikingly similar policies in recent years. I use a calibrated model to assess how policy might be sensitive to attaching different weights to inflation, output, and the output gap in central bank objectives. I find that a wide range of weights can give rise to rather similar monetary policies.     

Inflation targeting: What inflation rate to target?

In an economy with nominal rigidities in both an intermediate good sector and a finished good sector, and thus with a natural distinction between CPI and PPI inflation rates, a benevolent central bank faces a tradeoff between stabilizing the two measures of inflation, a final output gap and, unique to our model, a real marginal cost gap in the intermediate sector, so that optimal monetary policy is second-best. We discuss how to implement the optimal policy with minimal information requirement and evaluate the robustness of these simple rules when the central bank may not know the exact sources of shocks or nominal rigidities. A main finding is that a simple hybrid rule under which the short-term interest rate responds to CPI inflation and PPI inflation results in a welfare level close to the optimum, whereas policy rules that ignore PPI inflation or PPI sector shocks can result in significant welfare losses.     

通货膨胀目标制:理论、实践及其启示——兼论我国房地产市场调控

通货膨胀目标是由官方公开宣布未来一段时间内需要达到的通货膨胀目标或区间,明确承认低的、稳定的通货膨胀率是货币政策的首要长期目标。从长期看,中央银行可以产生系统的影响的惟一宏观经济变量只有通货膨胀率。没有中央银行的默许,通货膨胀就无法扎根。虽然石油价格冲击、持久干旱、升高的税收或者新的政府法令都有可能推动物价指数上升,除非中央银行对此不闻不问,否则,通货膨胀是不可能长久存在的。     

Exchange rate pass-through in emerging countries: Do the inflation environment,monetary policy regime and central bank behavior matter?

In this paper, we estimate the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to import and consumer prices for a sample of 14 emerging countries over the 1994Q1-2015Q3 period. To this end, we augment the traditional bivariate relationship between the nominal effective exchange rate and inflation by accounting for monetary stability proxied by the inflation environment, monetary policy regime and central bank behavior. We show that both the level and volatility of inflation, as well as adopting an inflation target or the transparency of monetary policy decisions clearly reduce ERPT to consumer prices. However, uncertainty about domestic monetary policy seems less relevant in explaining the pass-through to the price of imports.     

中央银行沟通、实际干预与通货膨胀稳定

近年来,中央银行沟通已成为一种重要的货币政策工具。本文把中央银行沟通因素引入修正的卢卡斯总供给函数,发现加大中央银行沟通力度有利于引导通货膨胀预期,稳定通货膨胀。采用2003-2009年月度数据,利用结构向量自回归方法对中央银行沟通及实际干预在稳定通货膨胀中的作用进行实证研究,主要结论如下:(1)正的中央银行沟通冲击能有效降低通货膨胀预期以及名义通货膨胀率,且时滞短;(2)正的实际干预(包括银行贷款利率、央票利率及货币供应量)冲击,在短期内不但不能降低通货膨胀预期及名义通货膨胀率,反而会加剧通货膨胀,出现"价格之谜"现象。此外,本文对大多数情况下我国中央银行沟通模棱两可的合理性进行了解释。     

货币政策透明度与通货膨胀的关系研究——基于PVAR模型的实证检验

通过使用PVAR模型对11个发达国家1999～2009年的中央银行货币政策透明度与通货膨胀的动态关系进行的实证分析表明:11国中央银行货币政策透明度的提高显著地降低了通货膨胀水平,但这种效应存在滞后;反之,通货膨胀对于货币政策透明度没有显著影响。因此,提高货币政策透明度、加强中央银行的信息披露从长期看对治理通货膨胀具有积极的作用。     

新凯因斯DSGE模型与货币政策法则之汇率动态分析

对于小型开放经济而言,当经济存在价格僵硬的情况下,中央银行在面对不同冲击发生时,各政策法则执行对汇率波动的影响及动态调整过程差异较大。从中国台湾地区的情况为案例来看,在稳定汇率波动方面:当国内技术冲击时,货币法则优于利率法则;当国外通货膨胀时,利率法则优于货币法则;当国外利率冲击时,执行利率法则或货币法则,其结果无显著差异。在汇率动态调整方面:当国外利率调升时,中央银行执行利率法则与货币法则下,汇率的瞬时反应为过度贬值;当国外物价膨胀时,执行利率法则与货币法则下,汇率的瞬时反应表现为立即升值;当国内技术进步冲击时,因为国外冲击对小型开放经济体系影响力道较强,使得国内技术进度对体系的影响相对较小,其中在利率法则下,汇率微幅贬值,而在货币法则下,汇率微幅升值。     

经常账户冲击、资本账户管理与中央银行货币政策操作

经常账户负向冲击及引发的宏观变量联动性通常对各经济体央行货币政策操作构成挑战。本文构建了融入经常账户冲击的小型开放经济DSGE模型,比较了采取不同资本账户管理工具(数量型和价格型)情景下,央行执行数量型货币政策规则、盯住CPI通胀泰勒规则、盯住PPI通胀泰勒规则下,经常账户负向冲击对货币政策操作的异质性影响及传导机制,并进行了福利分析。主要结论如下:第一,经常账户负向冲击将对本国央行货币政策操作构成一定影响;第二,资本账户管理可以成为缓冲经常账户负向冲击的防火墙,价格型资本账户管理工具与盯住PPI通胀泰勒规则相结合造成的福利损失较小;第三,经常账户贸易端与收益端双重负向冲击对一国货币政策操作的影响更大,但公众预期到的经常账户恶化对货币政策操作的影响将有所减弱。本文认为,转型经济体央行应倾向于执行价格型货币政策规则,最优货币政策应在稳定价格水平与缓释风险方面进行权衡,适度降低对名义汇率的关注度,稳慎推进资本账户开放进程,并可优先选择价格型资本账户管理工具。     

适度提高通胀容忍度有利于引导和管理通胀预期

中央银行应当致力于提高货币政策透明度,设置合适的通胀目标,以此引导和管理通胀预期。现阶段经济主体对通货膨胀的容忍度有所提高,适度提高通胀目标能减少频繁的目标偏离,增强中央银行的公信力,提高货币政策的有效性。实证研究表明,4.5%左右和[2%,6%]可以作为现阶段通胀目标值和目标区间的参考值。