Fiscal policy,macroeconomic performance and industry structure in a small open economy

We analyse how fiscal policy affects both the macroeconomy and the industry structure, using a multi-sector macroeconomic model of the Norwegian economy with an inflation targeting monetary policy. Our simulations show that the magnitude of the government spending and labour tax cut multipliers, whether monetary policy is active or passive, is comparable to what is found in the literature. A novel finding from our simulations is that the industry structure is substantially affected by an expansionary fiscal policy, as value added in the non-traded goods sector increases at the expense of value added in the traded goods sector. Moreover, expansionary fiscal policy reduces the mark-ups in the traded goods sector, while the mark-ups are roughly unchanged in the non-traded goods sector. The contraction of activity in the traded goods sector increases when monetary tightening accompanies the fiscal stimulus. Hence, we find that such a policy mix is likely to produce significant de-industrialization in a small open economy with inflation targeting.     

A Union-bashing Model of Inflation Targeting

This paper shows that in an open two‐sector economy, centralization of wage setting may be important in determining the employment (and welfare) effects of different monetary targets. By disciplining unions in the sectors open to international trade, exchange rate targeting yields higher employment than inflation targeting when wage‐setting is more centralized in the open sector than in the shielded sector. When wage‐setting centralization is higher in the shielded sector, we show that general price‐level inflation targeting, while better than exchange rate targeting, is inferior to an inflation target that focuses more heavily on shielded sector prices.     

Real wage rigidities and optimal monetary policy in a small open economy

The main objective of the study is to provide a theoretical analysis of optimal monetary policy in a small open economy where households set real wage in a staggered fashion. The introduction of real wage rigidities plays a important role to resolve main shortcomings of the standard new Keynesian small open economy model. The main findings regarding the issue of monetary policy design can be summarized as three fold. First, the optimal policy is to seek to minimize variance of domestic price inflation, real wage inflation, and the output gap if both domestic price and real wage are sticky. Second, controlling CPI inflation directly or indirectly induces relatively large volatility in output gap and other inflations. Therefore, both CPI inflation-based Taylor rule and nominal wage-inflation based Taylor rule are suboptimal. Last, a policy that responds to a real wage inflation is most desirable.     

UNEMPLOYMENT PERSISTENCE AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF EXCHANGE RATE PEGS

It is commonly thought that an open economy can accommodate output shocks through either exchange rate or real sector adjustments. We formalize this notion by incorporating unemployment persistence into a two‐sided escape clause model of currency crises. We show that unemployment persistence makes a currency peg more fragile and undermines the credibility of the monetary authority in a dynamic setting. The fragility is captured by a devaluation premium in expectations that increases the average inflation rate when the currency peg is more vulnerable to ‘busts’ than ‘booms’. This interaction between macroeconomic and microeconomic rigidities suggests that a policy reform can only be consistent if it renders either exchange rates or the economy more flexible.     

Sectoral Adjustments In Eastern Germany Due to Market Forces*

Some characteristics of the eastern German economy are analyzed as to their effects on the adjustment to market forces, using a modified Ricardo-Viner model. Included are transfer payments, EC farm policy, wage policy, and currency overvaluation. the analysis shows that the adjustments for a sector cannot be understood solely in terms of developments in that sector alone. the wage policy and the currency conversion magnified the adjustments in agriculture. Agricultural policy dampened the decline in agricultural output and had positive spillover effects on nontraded goods. Such interconnections must be kept in mind when analyzing the reform process.     

Wage bargaining and inflation

This paper investigates the issue of time inconsistency of monetary policy in a game with perfect information and infinite repetitions. The private sector is described by a wage negotiation process between a labour union and a firm. Unlike in the standard literature, the model has the feature that as the distortion of the economy gets larger, namely as the bargaining power of the union increases, the reputational equilibrium with low inflation becomes more likely to occur. This finding is consistent with the observation that higher levels of the labour cost are not typically associated with higher levels of inflation.     

The cost of capital,asset prices,and the effects of monetary policy

The primary objective of this paper is to study the interaction between monetary policy, asset prices, and the cost of capital. In particular, we explore this issue in a setting where individuals face idiosyncratic risk. Incomplete information also provides a transactions role for money so that monetary policy can be studied. In contrast to standard monetary growth models which focus on the transmission of monetary policy to the demand for capital goods, we incorporate a separate capital goods sector so that the supply response to monetary policy is taken into account. Consequently, in contrast to the standard monetary growth model, monetary policy plays an important role in investment activity through the relative price of capital goods. Moreover, different sources of productivity can affect the degree of risk sharing. Although the optimal money growth rate falls in response to an increase in productivity in either sector of the economy, monetary policy should react more aggressively to the level of productivity in the capital sector.     

Relative Prices in Monetary Union and Floating

The setting is a small open economy with an open sector and a sheltered sector. If the unions that operate in each sector coordinate their wage claims within the sector, the choice of monetary regime—monetary union or floating with an inflation target—affects the relative prices of tradables and non–tradables as well as real wages and employment. EMU membership results in lower prices of tradable goods and lower relative wages in the open sector, while opposite results hold for sheltered sector prices and wages.
JEL classification : E 5; E 24; E 42; J 5; J 31     

汇率政策、FDI与经济增长

中央货币当局的汇率政策和资本管制政策的目标之一在于促进FDI流入中国,并且带来技术进步及全要素生产率的提高,从而促进经济增长。但是中央货币当局的汇率政策却会越来越受制于引进技术部门凸性生产函数的限制,从而使得汇率政策的作用下降。因此,中央货币当局应当审慎考虑自己的汇率政策,依据国民经济发展的不同状态和生产函数的具体特征而重新估计汇率政策的作用和代价。     

The effects of monetary policy: a DSGE model analysis of Taiwan

This article attempts to use empirical data to analyse the impact of monetary policy in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. According to the monetary policy decisions of the Central Bank of China (Taiwan), maintaining price, financial stability and fostering economic growth are the ultimate goals of monetary policy during the empirical period. First, this article uses the cointegration tests to determine the operating targets, the intermediate targets and the ultimate goals of monetary policy. Then, a forward-looking aggregate demand–aggregate supply model for a small open economy is specified, and policy discretion is included in this model. Finally, the model is estimated by a linear state space model and is used to analyse the short-run effects of a systematic monetary change.     

Optimal Monetary Policy with Price and Wage Rigidities

In this paper, I search for an optimal configuration of parameters for variants of the Taylor rule by using an accurate second‐order welfare‐based method within a fully microfounded dynamic stochastic model, with price and wage rigidities, without capital accumulation. A version of the model with distortionary taxation is also explicitly tested. The model is solved up to second‐order solution. Optimal rules are obtained by maximizing a conditional welfare measure, differently from what has been done in the current literature. Optimal monetary policy functions turn out to be characterized by inflation targeting parameter lower than in empirical studies. In general, the optimal values for monetary policy parameters depend on the degree of nominal rigidities and on the role of fiscal policy. When nominal rigidities are higher, optimal monetary policy becomes more aggressive to inflation. With a tighter fiscal policy, optimal monetary policy turns out to be less aggressive to inflation. Impulse‐response functions based on second‐order model solution show a non‐affine pattern when the economy is hit by shocks of different magnitude .     

Imperfect credibility,sticky wages,and welfare

This paper studies optimal monetary policy under imperfect credibility in a New Keynesian model with staggered price and wage setting. In our imperfect credibility framework, the central bank commits to a policy plan but occasionally reneges on past promises with a given common knowledge probability. We find that the welfare gains from increasing credibility are approximately linear on the initial credibility level. We also find that the output-inflation stabilisation trade-off is nonmonotonic as higher credibility does not always reduce output volatility. The variance decomposition shows that wage markup shocks are the main driver of economic fluctuations and that these shocks are better contained, even in relative terms, when credibility is high. We then show that the degree of credibility impacts the effect of wage flexibility on welfare. When credibility is low, monetary policy is less potent and the economy can experience a feedback loop between wage volatility and price volatility. We show, though, that once wage markup shocks are taken into account, wage flexibility is usually welfare improving.     

SEARCH,LIMITED PARTICIPATION,AND MONETARY POLICY*

A model is developed that employs recent developments in the literature on search models of money to capture the distributional effects of monetary policy in a tractable way. Deterministic and stochastic versions of the model are studied. Money is not neutral, and these nonneutralities persist, whether or not the change in the money supply is anticipated or unanticipated. At the optimum, monetary policy is geared to correcting distortions in the search sector of the economy, while correcting for the persistent effects of past monetary policy actions.     

Unemployment, Wage Developments and the Economic Policy Mix in Europe

The paper considers the importance of wage formation for the policy mix in Europe. When monetary policy is committed to price stability, unit labour costs are a crucial factor in achieving this objective. Traditional Phillips curve or modern NAIRU models focus on labour market flexibility to achieve coherent wage developments because they take a short run perspective where the capital stock is fixed. However, in a long term perspective, the capital stock adjusts to profit opportunities which depend on the portfolio choices of investors which in turn are influenced by monetary policy. The time path of the price level depends then on a trend that is set by unit labour costs and a mean reverting profit mark-up that is dependent on capital costs. Monetary policy can become growth-supporting, if unit labour costs remain consistent with the central bank's price objective.     

Why has US monetary policy become ineffective lately?

Some recent studies show that US monetary policy has lost its stimulative traction, especially since the early 1980s. They argue that the Fed’s forward guidance has enabled economic agents to anticipate the changes in interest rates more accurately. As a result, it is harder to find truly exogenous monetary policy shocks, which has made monetary policy ineffective. In this article, we find that anomalous economic behaviours of financial institutions might be the true reason for the ineffective monetary policy. Our structural vector autoregressive model shows that increases in the US money supply mostly flowed into the financial sector to increase its profits instead of stimulating the real sector of the economy through business investment.     

A Case for Managed Exchange Rates*

The incorporation of adaptive expectations by Dornbusch in a Mundell-Fleming model modifies significantly the traditional results of policy effectiveness in a small, open economy. While monetary policy is still able to influence aggregate demand when flexible exchange rates prevail, the effects of this policy on other important variables in the economy during the adjustment process to a new equilibrium may be considered sufficiently ‘disruptive’ so that the authorities will be hesitant to use their only fully-effective policy instrument for income-stabilization purposes. However, by adding a target level for the exchange rate to their list of goal variables and by using an appropriate mix of monetary and fiscal policies, it appears to be possible for the government to avoid these disruptive side effects.     

The impact of monetary policy on housing market activity: An assessment using sign restrictions

Existing research demonstrates that housing, particularly residential investment, plays an important role in the transmission of monetary policy shocks to the overall economy. With this in mind, this paper investigates the relationship between monetary policy and housing market activity using a relatively new method for identifying monetary shocks. More specifically, a monetary policy shock is identified by explicitly imposing sign restrictions on impulse response vectors. The extra information from sign restrictions is important for new insights regarding the transmission of monetary policy to the housing sector – notably, the results indicate that residential investment is less sensitive to a contractionary shock than standard estimates with recursive restrictions. Given that the response of the housing sector using sign restrictions is smaller than other work using standard identification methods, the work indicates that further research is needed to examine whether other sectors of the economy may be less sensitive to monetary policy than previously thought.     

A forecasting model of the Kenyan economy

A demand-oriented macroeconometric model of the Kenyan economy is developed and estimated in line with the cointegration technique. The estimated structure of the model is used to perform policy simulation experiments to determine the sensitivity of key macroeconomic variables to changes in exchange rate, net government current expenditure and nominal interest rate. The results of policy simulation experiments reveal that the exchange rate and fiscal policies are relatively more effective than the monetary policy, i.e. changing the nominal interest rate, in influencing the level of economic activity. The results point to the possibility of devaluation improving the international trade balance.     

Wage rigidities and unemployment fluctuations in a small open economy

This study analyzes the implications of the monetary policy for the unemployment rate in a small open economy. We introduce nominal wage rigidities and unemployment into the small open economy version of the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. We derive three main findings. First, under nominal wage rigidities, the cyclical properties of the calibrated model, in response to a productivity shock, are consistent with the empirical evidence on a decrease in employment and an increase in real wages. Second, for all the variables considered, the Taylor rule tracks the optimal policy better than the simple rule with unemployment as an argument. Third, regardless of the output or unemployment gap being targeted, it is not optimal that central banks respond to nominal exchange rate variations.     

MONETARY AND FISCAL POLICY EFFICIENCY AND COORDINATION IN A MULTI‐SECTOR OPEN‐ECONOMY GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL

The paper analyzes monetary and fiscal stabilization and coordination in a multi‐sector stochastic new open economy macroeconomics (NOEM) model. It first aims to assess the capacity of fiscal and monetary policy to reduce or eliminate the negative welfare effects of an unanticipated productivity shock affecting some or all of the sectors in each country. Second, it evaluates the possible gains from international monetary cooperation as well as the impact of active fiscal policy on the welfare performance of monetary policy. The setup also allows for international asymmetry concerning the uncertainty over the shocks. The results show that monetary and fiscal policies are efficient tools of stabilization and under several conditions they can replicate the flexible‐price equilibrium. However, their welfare performance is not necessarily increased when both monetary and fiscal policies react to shocks at the national level. The existence of bilateral gains from monetary cooperation depends on the degree of asymmetry concerning the uncertainty over the shocks.