The Role of Interbank Markets in Monetary Policy: A Model with Rationing

This paper analyzes the impact of asymmetric information in the interbank market and establishes its crucial role in the microfoundations of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We show that interbank market imperfections induce an equilibrium with rationing in the credit market. This has two major implications: first, it reconciles the irresponsiveness of business investment to the user cost of capital with the large impact of monetary policy ( magnitude effect ), and second, it shows that banks' liquidity positions condition their reaction to monetary policy ( Kashyap and Stein liquidity effect ).     

Securitization and the balance sheet channel of monetary transmission

This paper shows that the balance sheet channel of monetary transmission is stronger for US banks that securitize their assets. This finding is different, in spirit, from the widely-found negative relationship between financial development and the strength of the lending channel of monetary transmission. Focusing on the balance sheet channel, and using bank-level observations, we find that securitizing banks are more sensitive to borrowers’ balance sheets and that monetary policy has a greater impact on this sensitivity for securitizing banks. The optimality conditions from a simple partial equilibrium framework suggest that the positive effects of securitization on policy effectiveness could be due to the high sensitivity of security prices to policy rates.     

The high-frequency response of exchange rates to monetary policy actions and statements

This paper investigates the impact of US monetary policy on the level and volatility of exchange rates using an event study with intraday data for five currencies (the US dollar exchange rate versus the euro, the Canadian dollar, the British pound, the Swiss franc, and the Japanese yen). I construct two indicators of news about monetary policy stemming separately from policy decisions and from balance of risk statements. Estimation results show that both policy decisions and communication have economically large and highly significant effects on the exchange rates, with the surprise component of statements accounting for most of the explainable variation in exchange rate returns in response to monetary policy. This paper also shows that exchange rates tend to absorb FOMC monetary surprises within 30-40 min from the announcement release.     

Monetary policy news and exchange rate responses: Do only surprises matter?

We use data from the Federal Funds Futures market to show that exchange rates respond to only the surprise component of an actual US monetary policy change and we illustrate that failure to disentangle the surprise component from the actual monetary policy change can lead to an underestimation of the impact of monetary policy, or even to a false rejection of the hypothesis that monetary policy impacts exchange rates. Unlike the recent contributions to the literature on exchange rates and monetary policy news, our testing method avoids the imposition of assumptions regarding exchange rate market efficiency. We also add to the debate on how quickly exchange rates respond to news by showing that the exchange rates under study absorb monetary policy surprises within the same day as the news are announced.     

Excess liquidity,bank pricing rules,and monetary policy

This paper studies the implications of excess bank liquidity for the effectiveness of monetary policy in a simple model with credit market imperfections. The demand for excess reserves is determined by precautionary factors and the opportunity cost of holding cash. It is argued that excess liquidity may impart greater stickiness to the deposit rate in response to a monetary contraction and induce an easing of collateral requirements on borrowers – which in turn may translate into a lower risk premium and lower lending rates. As a result, asymmetric bank pricing behavior under excess liquidity may hamper the ability of a contractionary monetary policy to lower inflation.     

A fiscal theory of sovereign risk

Under certain monetary-fiscal regimes the risk of default and thus the emergence of sovereign risk premiums are inevitable. This paper argues that in this context even small differences in the specification of monetary policy can have enormous effects on the equilibrium behavior of default rates and risk premiums. Under some monetary policy rules studied, the conditional expectation of default rates and sovereign risk premiums are constant, so movements in these variables always arrive as a surprise. Under other monetary regimes considered, the equilibrium default rate and the sovereign risk premium are serially correlated and therefore forecastable. The paper also studies the consequences of delaying default. It characterizes environments under which procrastinating on default is counterproductive.     

Globalization, Macroeconomic Performance, and Monetary Policy

The paper argues that many of the exaggerated claims that globalization has been an important factor in lowering inflation in recent years just do not hold up. Globalization does, however, have the potential to be stabilizing for individual economies and has been a key factor in promoting economic growth. The paper then examines four questions about the impact of globalization on the monetary transmission mechanism and arrives at the following answers: (i) Has globalization led to a decline in the sensitivity of inflation to domestic output gaps and thus to domestic monetary policy? No. (ii) Are foreign output gaps playing a more prominent role in the domestic inflation process, so that domestic monetary policy has more difficulty stabilizing inflation? No. (iii) Can domestic monetary policy still control domestic interest rates and so stabilize both inflation and output? Yes. (iv) Are there other ways, besides possible influences on inflation and interest rates, in which globalization may have affected the transmission mechanism of monetary policy? Yes.     

Voluntary Reserve Targets

We study monetary policy implementation through an operating regime involving voluntary reserve targets (VRTs). Operating regimes based on reserve requirements may lead to a collapse in interbank trade, as they have since the financial crisis. We show that, no matter the abundance of reserves, VRTs encourage market activity and support the central bank's control over interest rates. We consider (i) the impact of anticipated and unanticipated liquidity injections by the central bank on market outcomes and (ii) a comparison with the implementation framework currently adopted by the Federal Reserve. Overall, a VRT framework may provide several advantages over other frameworks.     

Price Stability with Imperfect Financial Integration

This paper studies whether the international monetary system can be affected by asymmetries in the cross-country positions in the international financial markets, i.e., the fact that some countries are large debtors while others are creditors. An important channel that is explored is the interaction between international risk sharing and the stabilization role of monetary policy in each country. The main finding is that the welfare costs of incomplete markets and the gains of deviating from a policy of price stability are increasing with the cross-country asymmetries in the initial net international positions and in particular they become nonnegligible when the persistence of the shocks increases (1% of a permanent shift in steady-state consumption, for the welfare costs of incomplete markets, and 0.2%, for the gains of deviating from a policy of price stability). When global imbalances become larger, optimal monetary policy requires an increase in the volatilities of the real returns on assets and in particular of the nominal interest rates, which should happen to be more correlated across countries.     

The impact of monetary policy on the exchange rate: evidence from three small open economies

This paper studies the impact effect of monetary policy shocks on the exchange rate in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the 1990s. Shocks are identified by the reaction of three month market interest rates to policy announcements that were not themselves endogenous to economic news on the same day. The main result is that a 100 basis point contractionary shock will appreciate the exchange rate by 2-3 percent on impact. The association of interest rate hikes with depreciations that is sometimes observed during periods of exchange market pressure is mainly attributable to reverse causality.     

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.     

新常态下中国货币政策的宏观经济效应研究 ——基于不同中介目标的实证检验

以中国2003-2020年的季度宏观经济数据为样本,通过构建时变系数向量自回归模型分析银行间同业拆借利率、M2、信贷规模、社会融资规模四项货币政策中介目标对实际产出、通货膨胀、房地产市场以及股票市场的动态影响效应.结果表明:同业拆借利率对产出的影响呈增强趋势,M2、信贷以及社会融资规模等数量型货币政策对产出的影响效应更显著;信贷与社会融资规模对通货膨胀的影响效应较显著;同业拆借利率对房地产市场的短期影响效应较大;M2、信贷与社会融资规模对房地产与股票市场的长期影响效应较大.     

Monetary Policy, Determinacy, and Learnability in a Two-Block World Economy

We study how determinacy and learnability of worldwide rational expectations equilibrium may be affected by monetary policy in a simple, two-country, New Keynesian framework under both fixed and flexible exchange rates. We find that open economy considerations may alter conditions for determinacy and learnability relative to closed economy analyses and that new concerns can arise in the analysis of classic topics such as the desirability of exchange rate targeting and monetary policy cooperation.     

Payment system disruptions and the federal reserve following September 11, 2001

The monetary and payment system consequences of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Federal Reserve's response are reviewed. Interbank payment disruptions appear to be a central feature of many US banking crises, and interbank payment disruptions seem likely to recur. Federal Reserve credit extension following September 11 succeeded in massively increasing the supply of banks’ balances to satisfy the disruption-induced increase in demand and thereby ameliorate the effects of the shock. Relatively benign banking conditions helped make Fed credit policy manageable. An interbank payment disruption that coincided with less-favorable banking conditions could be more difficult to manage, given current daylight credit policies. Paying interest on reserves would facilitate improvements in daylight credit policy.     

The effect of a common currency on the volatility of the extensive margin of trade

This paper studies the effects of the European monetary unification on the volatility of the extensive margin of trade. First, we highlight empirical novel facts about the effects of monetary unification. We build country-level measures of the extensive margin of intra-EMU exports and describe how their volatilities evolved over time. We show that the adoption of a common currency has been associated with an increase of the volatility of the extensive margin of exports for most countries, and a decrease in the volatility of the extensive margin of exports for Germany. Second, we address this question theoretically and build a two-country version of the model of Ghironi and Melitz (2005) with endogenous entry, heterogenous firms, endogenous tradability, endogenous labor supply and sticky prices. We compare the volatility of the extensive margin of trade under fixed exchange rates and in a monetary union. Monetary unification does imply an increase in the volatility of the extensive margin of trade for pre-EMU followers (such as France or the Netherlands) and a decrease in the volatility of the extensive margin of trade for the leader (Germany). This pattern is qualitatively consistent with the data but arises only if monetary policy responds moderately to output.     

Real exchange rate persistence and monetary policy rules

The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects of alternative monetary rules on real exchange rate persistence. Using a two-country stochastic dynamic general equilibrium with nominal price stickiness and local currency pricing, we will show how the persistence of purchasing power parity deviations can be related to a monetary theory of these deviations. When monetary policy lean against the wind, there is no relationship of proportionality between the time during which prices remain sticky and the persistence of the response of the real exchange rate: in this case high nominal price rigidity is not sufficient, per se, in generating any persistence following a monetary shock. Moreover, we emphasize the role of interest rates smoothing policies and relative price stickiness within countries in understanding the relationship between the real exchange rate and monetary shocks. With reasonable parameters values, a wide range of monetary policy rules can generate real exchange rate autocorrelations around the ones observed in the data.     

货币政策对银行间市场流动性影响效应的实证研究及启示

银行间货币市场是央行实施货币政策的重要平台，研究货币政策对银行间市场流动性的影响对于完善商业银行日常流动性管理具有重要意义。文章在设定银行间市场流动性测度指标与梳理货币政策工具对市场流动性的影响机制的基础上，分别使用事件分析法和时间序列模型对不同政策工具的影响效应进行实证分析，得出相关分析结论，并总结其对于完善商业银行日常流动性管理的启示。     

The impact of monetary policy on asset prices

Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that exists in high-frequency data. We show that the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy can be identified based on the increase in the variance of policy shocks that occurs on days of FOMC meetings and of the Chairman's semi-annual monetary policy testimony to Congress. The identification approach employed requires a much weaker set of assumptions than needed under the “event-study” approach that is typically used in this context. The results indicate that an increase in short-term interest rates results in a decline in stock prices and in an upward shift in the yield curve that becomes smaller at longer maturities. The findings also suggest that the event-study estimates contain biases that make the estimated effects on stock prices appear too small and those on Treasury yields too large.     

External shocks, U.S. monetary policy and macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging markets

Estimated structural VARs show that external shocks are an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging markets. Furthermore, U.S. monetary policy shocks affect interest rates and the exchange rate in a typical emerging market quickly and strongly. The price level and real output in a typical emerging market respond to U.S. monetary policy shocks by more than the price level and real output in the U.S. itself. These findings are consistent with the idea that “when the U.S. sneezes, emerging markets catch a cold.” At the same time, U.S. monetary policy shocks are not important for emerging markets relative to other kinds of external shocks.     

Monetary union, price level convergence, and inflation: How close is Europe to the USA?

The pattern of price dispersion across European and US cities from 1990 to 2004 is documented. There is a striking decline in dispersion for traded goods prices in Europe, most of which took place prior to the launch of the euro. Dispersion in the euro area is now quite close to that of the USA. This evidence provides useful facts for future work assessing the importance of various developments in Europe: harmonization of tax rates, convergence of incomes and labor costs, liberalization of trade and factor markets, and increased coherence of monetary policy.