Monetary policy inertia reconsidered: Evidence from endogenous interest rate trajectory

By finding small forecastable variability of future policy rates by highly smoothed central bank's endogenous interest rate trajectory, I suggest that market's failure to predict large portion of variability in future rates does not always imply limited policy inertia.     

Interest rate dispersion and volatility in the market for daily funds

The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of equilibrium in the market for daily funds. We use the EONIA panel database which includes daily information on the lending rates applied by contributing commercial banks. The data clearly show an increase in both the time series volatility and the cross-section dispersion of rates towards the end of the reserve maintenance period. These increases are highly correlated. We design a model to account for these empirical facts. Our theoretical model shows how the operational framework of monetary policy causes a reduction in the elasticity of the supply of funds by banks throughout the reserve maintenance period. This reduction in the elasticity together with market segmentation and heterogeneity is able to generate distributions for the interest rates and quantities traded with the same properties as in the data. We also investigate the effects of the changes in the Eurosystem's operational framework, enacted on March 2004, for interest rate behaviour.     

Fertility choice and economic growth: Empirical evidence from the U.S.

This paper provides empirical evidence to support the proposition of Barro and Becker [1989] that fertility depends positively on the world's long-term real interest rates and negatively on real wages in an economy linked to an international capital market. The empirical evidence suggests that there is no long-run relationship among fertility choice, real wages, long-term real interest rates, and output growth in the U.S. over the period 1960–95. However, when estimating a VAR model and employing the variance decomposition analysis and the impulse response functions, the empirical results support the endogeneity of fertility choice and the proposition that real wages, long-term real interest rates, and output growth is related to changes in fertility choice. The empirical results have important policy implications and provide an explanation for the decline of fertility in Western countries mainly in the last three decades.The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not those of the Bank of Greece.     

金融市场条件与货币政策关系的解析——基于四元VAR-GARCH(1,1)-BEKK模型的分析

本文基于我国股票市场、债券市场、外汇市场以及货币市场的日数据,选取四变量VAR(6)-GARCH(1,1)-BEKK模型,分析了汇率改革以来股票市场、债券市场、外汇市场与货币政策的互动关系。研究显示,上述三个主要金融市场与货币市场间存在显著的一阶矩和二阶矩关联性,说明中央银行的货币政策可能关注了金融市场条件的变化。基于脉冲响应函数的分析表明,中央银行的货币政策意图能够在金融市场间较为有效传导,同时,金融市场条件的变化对货币政策传导构成一定程度的冲击。为此,中央银行需要提高对金融市场变化的关注程度,增强货币政策的透明度,并强化货币政策与汇率政策的协调搭配,以减小外部冲击对宏观经济稳定的影响。     

The Eurozone Sovereign Debt Problem: What It Means for U.S. Exports

The European sovereign debt problem became the focus of world attention in 2010, when the interest rates on Greek government bonds rose dramatically, requiring immediate action by the European Union to avoid an imminent default. It has become clear that the problem is not limited to Greece, but a more general problem of the fundamental imbalances and underlying inconsistencies in the Eurozone economic system of using a single currency for a set of countries that lack a unified economic and political system. Financial markets reacted to the debt offering of the other deficit countries in the Eurozone by increasing interest rates on their sovereign debt as well. The major consequences are likely to be largely felt by the Eurozone countries themselves, some of whom will be forced to go through significant structural adjustments over the coming years. The adjustment process could generate a range of alternative macroeconomic outcomes for affected countries??including differences in growth, exchange rates, and investment??which could have significant implications for U.S. trade. This paper attempts to allay some of that uncertainty by exploring a wide range of alternative global macroeconomic outcomes and their potential impact on U.S. exports. The analysis extends the work done in a previous paper which focused on U.S. agricultural exports and its major components. While U.S. exports vary across the scenarios, continued strong economic growth in developing countries supports demand for U.S. exports. Because the EU has represented a declining share of U.S. exports, the direct impact of changes in European demand affects U.S. exports less than the secondary effects of changes in exchange rates and global investment patterns associated with alternative EU outcomes.     

Inflation targeting credibility and reputation: The consequences for the interest rate

The measurement of credibility and reputation is fundamental for the analysis of countries which adopted inflation targeting. Under this perspective, the objective of this article is to illustrate which measures of credibility and reputation are most useful in predicting variations of interest rates. Given a specific inflation target, this relationship is valuable for central bankers as well as for private agents trying to predict the central bank's policies. Due to the fact that Brazil represents a potential laboratory experiment in which the effects of an adoption of inflation targeting after more than a half decade can be observed, an analysis through several indices and its relation with the basic interest rate is made. The findings denote that the credibility indices based on reputation represent an alternative in the cases where the series of inflation expectation are not available. Furthermore, the empirical evidence confirms the hypothesis that higher credibility implies lower variations in the interest rate for controlling inflation.     

Speculative attacks with unpredictable or unknown foreign exchange reserves

During a currency crisis, speculators usually do not know the value of a central bank's foreign exchange reserves. In this paper I show that modelling speculators as having imperfect knowledge of reserves enriches the predictions of the classical model of speculative attacks. With realistic lags in reserve reporting and costs to unsuccessful speculation, successful speculative attacks will involve a jump depreciation, unsuccessful attacks may occur, attacks may occur when fundamentals are improving, attacks may not be preceded by large increases in interest rates, and fixed exchange rates may be abandoned with no attack and no decline in the money supply. JEL Classification: F31     

PROSPECTS FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN GREECE

ABSTRACT: Local authorities in Greece were considered until recently instruments for the implementation of government policy. The article focuses on the major nomothetical reforms in the history of modern Greece to revive local autonomy and provide local people with more opportunities to define their own development needs. Apart from criticizing those reforms and raising points of interest for other countries with a highly centralized system of government, the prospects for community development in Greece are examined and a number of suggestions are offered.     

International trade and macroeconomic dynamics: The case of U.S. bilateral trade with G-7 countries

The short- and long-run effects of exchange rates, income, interest rates and government spending on U.S. bilateral trade with the other G-7 countries are investigated using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. The primary contribution of this study is to consider separating the analysis of exports and imports in an integrated model that empirically encompasses four major schools of thoughts – elasticity, Keynesian income, absorption and monetary approaches – in order to identify macroeconomic linkages to U.S. bilateral trade with the other G-7 countries accurately. Results suggest that, in both the short- and long-run, U.S. imports and exports are highly sensitive to changes in U.S. and foreign income, while U.S. imports and exports are relatively insensitive to changes in bilateral exchange rate. It is also found that both exports and imports are more responsive to changes in government spending than changes in interest rates in both the short- and long-run.     

Symmetric or Asymmetric Interest Rate Adjustments? Evidence from Southeastern Europe

The purpose of this paper is to examine how effectively the wholesale interest rates are transmitted to the retail rates and whether the interest rate passthrough is symmetric or asymmetric in Greece, Bulgaria, and Slovenia. The disaggregated general‐to‐specific methodology is applied for testing the symmetry hypothesis in these economies. It is evident from our results that variations exist across the countries examined regarding the monetary transmission process and the symmetry hypothesis alike. This can be interpreted as an indication of a different level of competition, development, and liberalization among the banking systems in these Southeastern European economies.