Optimal monetary policy with distinct core and headline inflation rates

In a stylized DSGE model with an energy sector, the optimal policy response to an adverse energy supply shock implies a rise in core inflation, a larger rise in headline inflation, and a decline in wage inflation. The optimal policy is well approximated by policies that stabilize the output gap, but also by a wide array of “dual mandate” policies that are not overly aggressive in stabilizing core inflation. Finally, policies that react to a forecast of headline inflation following a temporary energy shock imply markedly different effects than policies that react to a forecast of core, with the former inducing greater volatility in core inflation and the output gap.     

Discretionary monetary policy and inflation persistence

Rational expectations models of staggered price/wage contracts have failed to replicate the observed persistence in inflation and unemployment during disinflationary periods. The current literature on this persistency puzzle has focused on augmenting the nominal contract model with imperfect credibility and learning. In this paper, I re-examine the persistency puzzle by focusing on the discretionary nature of monetary policy. I show that when the central bank is allowed to re-optimize a quadratic loss function each period, imperfect credibility and learning, even in the absence of staggered contracts, can generate a significant amount of inflation persistence and employment losses during a disinflationary period.     

Optimal sustainable monetary policy

In recent monetary policy literature, optimal commitment policy and its variant from a timeless perspective have been studied with emphasis on welfare gains from policy commitment. These policies, however, involve a time-consistency problem called a stabilization bias in forward-looking models. We analyze Chari and Kehoe's [1990. Sustainable plans. Journal of Political Economy 98, 783-802] sustainable equilibrium and examine optimal sustainable policy, i.e. a policymaker's strategy in the best sustainable equilibrium. This paper shows that such a policy becomes consistent with the optimal commitment policy in sufficiently later periods. It also shows that whether the optimal sustainable policy can attain the Ramsey equilibrium outcome depends on the magnitude of shocks hitting the model economy. Moreover, the paper finds a sustainable policy that attains higher social welfare than discretionary policy does.     

Factors affecting monetary policy in an era of inflation

A money supply-reaction function is developed and estimated within the context of an IS-LM framework to test the responsiveness of the Federal Reserve to the government budget restraint and certain parameters of the model. The results reveal that a large portion of the recent expansion of the monetary base may be attributed to increases in government debt and provide an essential first step in quantifying the inflationary impact of deficits. The monetary base is also expanded in response to increases in inflationary expectations and previous increases in the monetary base, but is not statistically correlated to changes in the unemployment rate or potential national income, or to rises in interest rates caused by sources other than higher inflationary expectations, previous monetary policy, or the Treasury borrowing requirement.     

Debate: Economic policy and prospects; Accounting for inflation

Citizenship, a somewhat elusive concept, is explored in the context of social, economic and political entitlement. At the socio‐political level, it is argued that bodies intermediate to the state and individual—civil and civic formations—are necessary for citizenship to flourish in an atmosphere where experiments in living can take place. We currently lack a clear philosophy directed to creating an acceptable balance between individual self‐help, the enabling state which pilots the needs of citizens into agreed channels and intermediate social life forms. Such a philosophy needs to be developed alongside an institutional restructuring of the state. In this, a reformed constitutional and administrative law has a crucial role to play.     

Optimal fiscal policy under multiple equilibria

We study optimal fiscal policy in an economy where (i) search frictions create a coordination problem and generate multiple, Pareto-ranked equilibria and (ii) the government finances the provision of a public good by taxing market activity. The government must choose the tax rate before it knows which equilibrium will obtain, and therefore an important part of the problem is determining how the policy will affect the equilibrium selection process. We show that when the equilibrium selection rule is based on the concept of risk dominance, higher tax rates make coordination on the Pareto-superior outcome less likely. As a result, taking equilibrium-selection effects into account leads to a lower optimal tax rate.     

Optimal dividend policy and growth option

We analyse the interaction between the dividend policy and the decision on investment in a growth opportunity of a liquidity constrained firm. This leads us to study a mixed singular control/optimal stopping problem for a diffusion that we solve quasi-explicitly by establishing a connection with an optimal stopping problem. We characterize situations where it is optimal to postpone the distribution of dividends in order to invest at a subsequent date in the growth opportunity. We show that uncertainty and liquidity shocks have an ambiguous effect on the investment decision.      

Maintaining low inflation: Money, interest rates, and policy stance

This paper presents a systematic empirical relationship between money and subsequent prices and output, using US, euro area and Swiss data since the 1960-1970s. Monetary developments, unlike interest rate stance measures, are shown to provide qualitative and quantitative information on subsequent inflation. The usefulness of monetary analysis is contrasted to weaknesses in modeling monetary policy and inflation with respectively short-term interest rates and real activity measures. The analysis sheds light on the recent change in inflation volatility and persistence as well as on the Phillips curve flattening, and reveals drawbacks in pursuing a low inflation target without considering monetary aggregates.     

Optimal monetary policy with imperfect common knowledge

This paper determines optimal nominal demand policy in a flexible price economy in which firms pay limited attention to aggregate variables. Firms’ inattentiveness gives rise to idiosyncratic information errors and imperfect common knowledge about the shocks hitting the economy. This is shown to have strong implications for optimal nominal demand policy. In particular, if firms’ prices are strategic complements and economic shocks display little persistence, monetary policy has strong real effects, making it optimal to stabilize the output gap. Weak complementarities or sufficient shock persistence, however, cause price level stabilization to become increasingly optimal. With persistent shocks, optimal monetary policy shifts from output gap stabilization in initial periods following the shock to price level stabilization in later periods, potentially rationalizing the medium-term approach to price stability adopted by some central banks.     

Optimal tax policy when firms are internationally mobile

The standard tax theory result that investment should not be distorted is based on the assumption that profits are locally bound. In this paper, we analyze the optimal tax policy in a model where firms are internationally mobile. We show that the optimal policy response to increasing firm mobility may be taxation, subsidization, or non-distortion of the marginal investment, depending on whether the mobile firms are more or less profitable than the average firm in the economy. Our findings may contribute to understanding recent tax policy developments in many OECD countries.     

Monetary policy transmission,interest rate rules and inflation targeting in three transition countries

In 1991, the rate of inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was 57%, 35% and 70%. At the end of 2001, it was everywhere below 8%. We set up a small structural macro model of these three economies to account for the process of disinflation. We show that a simple macro model, with forward-looking inflation and exchange rate expectations, can adequately characterize the relationship between the output gap, inflation, the real interest rate and the exchange rate during this period. This model allows us to assess the relative importance of the interest rate and exchange rate channels in determining the path of disinflation.     

Optimal monetary policy,endogenous supply and rational expectations

In this paper we demonstrate that the choice of monetary policy regime will affect the variability of output when private agents, in forming their supply decisions, take into account the authority's selection of a policy rule. A striking feature of the analysis is that the choice between policy rules in Sargent-Wallace (1975) framework, but with endogenous aggregate supply, depends only on the variability of aggregate demand under each rule and not on the variability of aggregate supply. It follows that the choice of monetary policy rules reduces to the problem analyzed by Poole (1970) in the stochastic Keynesian structure.     

Optimal monetary policy with endogenous entry and product variety

Deviations from long-run price stability are optimal in the presence of endogenous entry and product variety in a sticky-price model in which price stability would be optimal otherwise Long-run inflation (deflation) is optimal when the benefit of variety to consumers falls short of (exceeds) the market incentive for creating that variety—the desired markup; Price indexation exacerbates this mechanism. Plausible preference specifications and parameter values justify positive long-run inflation rates. However, short-run price stability (around this non-zero trend) is close to optimal, even in the presence of endogenously time-varying desired markups that distort the intertemporal allocation of resources.     

Optimal unemployment benefit policy and the firm productivity distribution

This paper provides a novel justification for a declining time profile of unemployment benefits that does not rely on moral-hazard or consumption-smoothing considerations. We consider a simple search environment with homogeneous workers and low- and high-productivity firms. By introducing a declining time profile of benefits, the government can affect the equilibrium wage profile in a manner that enhances the sorting of workers across low- and high-productivity firms. We demonstrate that optimal government policy depends on the dispersion and skewness of the firms’ productivity distribution.     

Optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital

This paper is concerned with the structure and time-consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital. In a dynamic context, optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare-maximizing way. For a barter economy, our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure, an optimal policy, if one exists, is time-consistent. In a monetary economy, the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an ‘inflation tax’, and we find that time-consistency does not carry over. An optimal ‘inflation tax’ requires commitment by ‘rules’ in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes. The reason time-consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should, from a welfare-maximizing point of view, always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of ‘capital levy’. This emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital.     

Optimal dividend policy,debt policy and the level of investment within a multi-period DCF framework

This paper simultaneously analyses optimal dividend, debt and investment policy within a conventional multi-period DCF framework, and takes account of differential personal taxation over both investors and types of income, the effect of dividends and interest on the level of share issues and hence share issue costs, and the effect of dividends and interest on the level of internally-financed investment. Application of the model to three distinct tax regimes reveals that the value benefit from debt is small at best whilst the value benefit from dividends is substantial even in a regime without dividend imputation.     

Optimal monetary policy in a ‘sudden stop’

In the wake of the 1997-98 financial crises, interest rates in Asia were raised immediately, and then reduced sharply. We describe an environment in which this is the optimal monetary policy. The optimality of the immediate rise in the interest rate is an example of the theory of the second best: although high interest rates introduce an inefficiency wedge into the labor market, they are nevertheless welfare improving because they mitigate distortions due to binding collateral constraints. Over time, as the collateral constraint is less binding, the familiar Friedman forces dominate, and interest rates are optimally set as low as possible.     

中国输入型通胀特征明显

恰恰是由于美元的滥发,向中国注入了大量的流动性,导致中国财富的稀释,使得中国国内的成本推动型通胀压力日趋沉重。换句话讲,中国当前物价上升具有明显的输入型通胀特征。     

Intrinsic inflation persistence

Empirical evidence suggests that inflation determination is not purely forward-looking, but models of price setting have struggled to rationalize this finding without directly assuming backward-looking pricing rules for firms. This paper shows that intrinsic inflation persistence can be explained with no deviation from optimizing, forward-looking behaviour if prices that have remained fixed for longer are more likely to be changed than those set recently. A relationship between the probability of price adjustment and the duration of a price spell is shown to imply a simple “hybrid” Phillips curve including lagged and expected inflation, which is estimated using macroeconomic data.