The Bullionist Controversy: Theory and New Evidence

The Bullionist Controversy in the United Kingdom is one of the first debates about the determination of the price level and the exchange rate under a paper money standard. Despite the importance of the debate in the development of monetary theory, there remains little empirical evidence that uses modern, multivariate time series techniques. The evidence that does exist provides support for the Anti‐Bullionist position. The purpose of this paper is to review the debate and develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that is capable of capturing key features of the nineteenth‐century British financial system. The model is estimated using Bayesian procedures to test the competing hypotheses. The paper provides support for the Bullionist position.     

Do Cryptocurrencies Increase the Systemic Risk of the Global Financial Market?

The advance of cryptocurrencies has sparked wide concern over their interplay with the existing global financial market. This paper analyzes the risk spillover relation between cryptocurrencies and major financial assets, and unravels how cryptocurrencies could influence global financial systemic risk. We find that cryptocurrencies function as a separate risk source from traditional assets. Major legislative, financial and technological events in the cryptocurrency market may affect risk spillover dynamics. Although the overall penetration of cryptocurrencies is not yet deep, introducing cryptocurrency can significantly increase the systemic risk to traditional markets during low risk level episodes.     

Central bank disclosure as a macroprudential tool for financial stability

The Basel Capital Accord (pillar 3) states that disclosure of information (transparency) is essential to financial stability. This study analyzes, through inflation reports, the disclosure of information from the Central Bank of Brazil concerning the credit market. We consider credit risk and capital buffers as measures of financial stability in this analysis. Furthermore, in order to measure the perception of the monetary authority on the credit market, we built two indices based on the central bank’s communication on credit development. We performed a panel data analysis based on a sample of 125 banks for the period from June 1999 to September 2014 (7000 observations). The findings suggest that central bank communication regarding expectations concerning the credit market contributes to financial stability. Therefore, this kind of communication of central banks (about credit development) may constitute an important macroprudential tool to improve financial stability.     

Increasing linkages among European regions. The role of sectoral composition

This paper analyses changes in economic regional interlinkages in Europe over time and investigates the factors that could explain the dynamics of these changes. Our four main findings are the following: (i) we detect a significant surge in regional synchronisation after the Great Recession; (ii) we identify the regions most interrelated with the rest of Europe, namely, Ile de France, Inner London and Lombardia; (iii) we find that sectoral composition explains regional synchronisation in Europe, mainly after the Great Recession and (iv) we document that sectoral composition has important implications for aggregate economic fluctuations, in particular, that similarities in services-related sectors across regions explain a nonlinear relationship between sectoral composition and regional business cycle synchronisation. We also propose a new method to measure time-varying synchronisation in small samples that combines regime-switching models and dynamic model averaging.     

Optimal privatization policy with asymmetry among private firms

We revisit the relationship between the optimal privatization policy and market competition indexes such as the Hirschman–Herfindahl index. It is affected by the number of the firms and asymmetry among the sizes of the firms; the smaller the number of firms and the more asymmetry among firms, the higher the market concentration index. The literature on mixed oligopolies suggested that the optimal degree of privatization increases with the number of private firms, and thus, decreases with the market competition index, assuming that all private firms are homogeneous. We investigate how asymmetry among private firms affects the optimal degree of privatization. We propose the simplest and natural model formulation to discuss asymmetry among private firms. We find that the optimal degree of privatization is either nonmonotone or monotonically increasing, and thus never monotonically decreasing, in asymmetry among private firms.     

Self serving reference points in double auctions

We present a novel approach for modelling self serving bias by way of reference dependence. Bias is modelled as a systematic individual level deviation of the endogenous reference point from the expected price of a good in a two person k-double auction. We find that bias decreases the efficiency of the model, and that efficiency is decreasing in both the level of bias and reference dependence.     

Identifying Price Reviews by Firms: An Econometric Approach

Price reviews are a potentially costly activity. A significant fraction of unchanged prices may stem from firms not reviewing prices, rather than from obstacles to changing prices per se, such as menu costs. In this paper, we disentangle these two causes of price stickiness by estimating an inflated ordered probit model on a panel of French manufacturing firms. The results point to a low frequency of price reviews, suggestive of the relevance of information costs as a determinant of the observed price stickiness. In view of the “inattentive producers” literature, pointing that the source of price rigidity matters, this is suggestive of a large real effect of monetary policy.     

FX Intervention in the New Keynesian Model

We develop an open-economy New Keynesian Model with foreign exchange (FX) intervention in the presence of a financial accelerator and shocks to risk appetite in international capital markets. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal monetary and FX intervention policies assuming the central bank cannot commit to future policies, and we compare the solution to that under policy commitment. We show how FX intervention can help reduce the volatility of the exchange rate, of inflation, and of the output gap, thus mitigating welfare losses associated with shocks in the international capital markets. We also show that, when the financial accelerator is strong, there is a risk of indeterminacy (self-fulfilling currency and inflation movements) although FX intervention can reduce this risk and thus reinforce the credibility of the inflation targeting regime. Model simulations match well the impact of a VIX shock obtained by local projections on a panel of inflation targeting emerging markets.     

The Role of Inflation Target Adjustment in Stabilization Policy

How and under what circumstances can adjusting the inflation target serve as a stabilization-policy tool and contribute to welfare improvement? We answer these questions quantitatively with a standard New Keynesian model that includes cost-push-type shocks. Our proposed inflation target rule calls for the target to be adjusted in a persistent manner and in the opposite direction to the realization of a cost-push shock, which is essentially a makeup strategy. The inflation target rule, combined with a Taylor-type rule, significantly reduces inflation fluctuations originating from cost-push shocks and mitigates the stabilization trade-off, resulting in a similar level of welfare to that associated with the Ramsey optimal policy.     

Do news shocks increase capital utilization?

Using the workweek of capital as a measure of capital utilization, we empirically test whether news shocks actually increase capital utilization. To this end, by estimating a panel VAR on two-digit manufacturing data identifying news shocks as innovations to stock returns orthogonal to the variations in current-period TFP growth, we find the positive response of capital utilization to news shocks. Moreover, to explain the positive response of capital utilization to news shocks in terms of plant-level investment behavior, we propose a heterogeneous plant model that combines the fixed cost of capital adjustment and an endogenous capital utilization choice. With the presence of fixed costs, except for the plants that have recently adjusted capital stock, news shock shortens the effective time horizon of currently installed capital stock and increases capital utilization. When the model economy is calibrated to match the salient features of the plant-level investment rate distribution, the economy generates a news-driven positive response of capital utilization.