Inflation targeting in Brazil: constructing credibility under exchange rate volatility

This paper assesses the challenges faced by the inflation-targeting regime in Brazil. The inflation-targeting framework has played a critical role in macroeconomic stabilization. We stress two important challenges: construction of credibility and exchange rate volatility. The estimations indicate the following results: (i) the inflation targets have worked as an important coordinator of expectations; (ii) the Central Bank has reacted strongly to inflation expectations; (iii) there has been a reduction in the degree of inflation persistence; and (iv) the exchange rate pass-through for “administered or monitored” prices is two times higher than for “market” prices.     

Is the dollar peg suitable for the largest economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council?

The slumping of the GCC currencies against other major currencies and the ensuing rising imported inflation have sparked an ongoing debate about the viability of the dollar peg. This paper extends and applies the contribution of Berger et al. (2001) to the largest economies of the GCC, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, by introducing a foreign inflation dimension. Empirical estimations suggest little or no evidence supporting the suitability of a fixed exchange rate regime in any of the three analyzed economies. It is this paper's contention that policy makers ought to play an immediate and active role in identifying a suitable more flexible exchange rate regime as well as an achievable timeline and road map to effectively abandoning the dollar peg.     

Cost Channel of Monetary Policy: Financial Frictions and External Shocks

This paper deepens our understanding of the importance of the cost channel of monetary policy, where inflation adjusts with a firm's marginal cost of working capital. A model extended for a small, open economy with financial frictions is proposed and examined with data from Taiwan. The cost channel effect on inflation adjustment is substantiated by simultaneous generalized method of moments estimations and appears to be strengthened by financial frictions but mitigated by external shocks. Greater caution is hence required in the conduct of monetary policy for a bank-dependent emerging economy such as Taiwan because of the relative complexity in its supply-side interest rate pass-through.     

产业结构调整与中国通货膨胀缺口持久性

转轨时期作为中国经济结构最重要内容的产业结构调整可能诱发通货膨胀缺口持久性的变化。本文将通货膨胀缺口作为通货膨胀持久性的替代变量,采用新凯恩斯混合菲利普斯曲线模型对1996～2010年期间中国通货膨胀的持久性特征进行了考察,并运用Blanchard-Quah结构分解方法分析了产业结构调整对通货膨胀缺口持久性的影响。结果表明,与现有研究的结果相比,单变量和多变量模型评估的中国通货膨胀缺口持久性都显著较低。通货膨胀缺口受第一、二、三产业结构冲击减弱至0的时期分别为3、3、2个季度;第一产业的发展对通胀缺口持久性的短期冲击为正,第二、三产业的冲击为负;总体而言,第一和第二产业的发展弱化了通货膨胀缺口持久性,第一产业的作用更为显著,而第三产业则强化了通货膨胀缺口持久性。各产业结构变化对通货膨胀缺口持久性的冲击力度大小分别为第一、三、二产业。因此,治理通货膨胀必须考虑产业结构调整因素的影响。     

The reset inflation puzzle and the heterogeneity in price stickiness

New Keynesian models have been criticised on the grounds that they require implausibly large price shocks to explain inflation. Bils et al. (2012) show that, while these shocks are needed to reduce the excessive inflation persistence generated by the models, they give rise to unrealistically volatile reset price inflation. This paper shows that introducing heterogeneity in price stickiness in the models overcomes these criticisms directed at them. The incorporation of heterogeneity in price stickiness reduces the need for large price shocks. With smaller price shocks, the new model comes close to matching the data on reset inflation.     

货币因素、供给冲击与中国通胀动态特征

本文将以货币供应量和汇率为代表的货币因素、供给因素以及需求因素引入菲利普斯曲线建立了新凯恩斯混合菲利普斯曲线,并利用1995年第1季度～2013年第2季度的数据来实证分析不同因素对于我国通货膨胀动态衍化的影响。研究表明：前瞻性预期与通货膨胀惯性对于我国通货膨胀的影响同时存在,但是前瞻性预期对于我国通货膨胀的影响较大;其次,货币供应量变动对于我国通货膨胀率影响具有最重要的作用,而代表需求因素的产出缺口以及代表供给冲击的原油价格对于我国通货膨胀的影响很小;最后,人民币实际汇率升值对通货膨胀可以产生一定的抑制作用,但作用不大。     

Moderate Inflation and the Deflation–Depression Link

Recent research has concluded that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation episodes are harmful to economic growth. In this paper, we revisit this relationship by allowing for inflation and growth to have a nonlinear specification dependent on inflation levels. In particular, we allow for the possibility that high inflation is negatively correlated with growth, while a positive relationship exists over the range of negative to moderate inflation. Our results confirm a positive relationship between inflation and growth at moderate inflation levels, and support the contention that the relationship between inflation and growth is nonlinear over the entire sample range.     

Inflation targeting & implications of oil shocks for inflation expectations in oil-importing and exporting economies: Evidence from three Nordic Kingdoms

In the context of the debate on inflation targeting, this paper analyses the impact of the oil shocks on inflation expectations in three Nordic Kingdoms. A NARDL framework is applied to data from Jan 1994 to June 2018 on the Kingdoms of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Our key findings suggest that there are considerable nonlinearities and asymmetries in the relationship between inflation expectations, oil shocks and economic determinants of inflation expectations. The expectations formulated in the past have a very significant negative impact on future inflation expectations (adaptive expectations) and there is heterogeneity in the adaptiveness pace. A country's net oil trade position seems to reflect on the impact of oil price shocks on the inflation expectations and there is asymmetry and downwards inflation expectations rigidity. There is strong evidence of exchange rate pass-through to inflation expectations. Prevailing regimes of price stability can support to anchor future inflation expectations. Reduction in fiscal deficit and increases in money supply has a positive impact while unemployment has a negative impact on inflation expectations. The cumulative multiplier analysis showed that the impact of oil shock was symmetric in Sweden and Denmark but asymmetric in Norway which is a large net oil exporter. Besides the adoption of explicit inflation targeting regime by Sweden and Norway, the inflation expectations in the underlying economies are prone to the oil price shocks and macroeconomic determinants. These shocks pose a whole set of challenges to monetary authorities in these economies and the findings in the subject treatise provide some guidance on how each shock may transmit.     

Stock returns and expected inflation: evidence from an asymmetric test specification

Previous studies that examined the relationship between stock returns and inflation have used a symmetric test specification, and have reported evidence of an inverse relation. We use an asymmetric model to re-examine this fundamental relationship between stock returns and inflation. We partition the study period into sub-samples of high and low inflation regimes. An inverse relation between stock returns and inflation forecasts is found during only low inflation periods, while a positive relation is detected through high inflation periods. In combination, results from both high and low inflation regimes suggest that stocks have delivered favorable inflation protection.      

Economic forces and seasonality in secirity returns

This article finds strong seasonal behavior in the innovations for three Canadian macroeconomic variables (industrial production, unexpected inflation and GDP). An APT model is estimated as a restricted nonlinear multivariate regression system using seven macroeconomic variables, various residual market factor (RMF) proxies, and the returns on fifty size related portfolios of equities that traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE). As in Chen, Roll and Ross (1986), five macrofactors (lagged industrial production, lagged GDP, term structure, unexpected inflation, and risk premium) have significantly priced risk premia. The risk premia are insignificant for RMF based on two value weighted indices, and marginally significant (0.10 level) for the RMF based on an equally weighted index, which is somewhat consistent with McElroy and Burmeister (1988) and Brown and Otsuki (1989). The significance of the RMF risk premium appears not to be robust to whether portfolios or individual securities are used in the estimations. The significance of the estimated risk premia for the macrofactors also appear not to be robust to the number of portfolios (equations) used in the estimations. Unlike the risk premia estimates for the RMF, those for the other macrofactors are generally unaffected by the inclusion of a January dummy. This implies that the January seasonal remains a market phenomenon that requires further study.     

Survey Measures of Expected Inflation and the Inflation Process

The accuracy of inflation forecasts obtained from household and professional surveys has deteriorated noticeably of late, to the extent that a simple autoregressive specification outperforms survey forecasts. The decline in (absolute and relative) accuracy has taken place at about the same time as an apparent change in the inflation process. Projections of household forecasts on realized inflation suggests that households have not recognized this change. For the professionals, projections of expected inflation on headline inflation have changed, but on core inflation have not. By contrast, projections of realized headline inflation on core have changed sharply.     

REIT Stock Prices with Inflation Hedging and Illusion

Employing dividend yield decomposition, this paper explores the inflation illusion and inflation hedging effects on REIT stock prices. Results show that changes in expected inflation explain a large share of the time series variation of the mispricing component of the dividend yield. Also, while both inflation hedging and inflation illusion effects exist for REITs, the inflation illusion effect tends to dominate the hedging effect during the 1980 to 2008 period. These results suggest that investors are unable to quickly reconcile changes in discount rates and dividend growth rates associated with inflation into stock prices. The findings also provide an alternative explanation as to why short-term REIT returns are often negatively related to expected inflation.     

Macroeconomic Factors in the Dynamics of Corporate and Household Saving: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

This article uses panel data estimations on annual data from 10 Central and Eastern European countries to assess the effect of different macroeconomic variables on the dynamics of corporate and household saving. The analyses show that changes in the macroeconomic environment affect the saving rates in both sectors, but with marked differences across the two sectors. The differences are most pronounced for the output gap, the real interest rate, the inflation rate, and the current account balance. Some variables, including the unemployment rate and changes in the real exchange rate, are unimportant in both sectors. The different results for the two sectors underscore the importance of analyzing the factors driving the dynamics of corporate and household saving separately.     

Optimal central bank transparency

Should central banks increase their degree of transparency any further? We show that there is likely to be an optimal intermediate degree of central bank transparency. Up to this optimum more transparency is desirable: it improves the quality of private sector inflation forecasts. But beyond the optimum people might: (1) start to attach too much weight to the conditionality of their forecasts, and/or (2) get confused by the large and increasing amount of information they receive. This deteriorates the (perceived) quality of private sector inflation forecasts. As a result, inflation is set in a more backward looking manner resulting in higher inflation persistence. By using a large scale panel data set on the transparency of central banks we find empirical support for an optimal intermediate degree of transparency at which inflation persistence is minimized. Our results indicate that while several central banks would benefit from further transparency increases, some already have reached the optimal level.     

我国通货膨胀率动态特征研究

应用LSTAR模型对我国通货膨胀率的动态特征进行的实证研究结果表明:我国通货膨胀率自身调整有明显的非线性特征,分为显著的低通货膨胀区制和高通货膨胀区制,区制转移的平滑参数较大,转移变量为滞后1期通货膨胀率,转折点为0.01036.同时,我国通货膨胀率存在一定程度的非对称性调整,随冲击大小、方向、区制不同而表现不同.此外,我国通货膨胀率具有较高的持久性,高通货膨胀区制的持久性明显低于低通货膨胀区制.     

Ordering Uncertain Options under Inflation: A Note

Stochastic dominance rules (SD) have been extended to the case where investors are allowed to borrow and lend at the riskless interest rate. Stochastic dominance rules with a riskless asset (SDR) are much more effective than SD rules. However, it seems that this benefit is eliminated by an uncertain inflation, since riskless assets become risky once uncertain inflation is considered. We prove in this paper that SDR criteria are valid also in the face of uncertain (and independent) inflation. Moreover, while the mean-variance (MV) efficient set increases with uncertain inflation, the stochastic dominance efficient sets decrease.     

Stock market bubbles, inflation and investment risk

This paper proposes an autoregressive regime-switching model of stock price dynamics in which the process creates pricing bubbles in one regime while error-correction prevails in the other. In the bubble regime the stock price depends negatively on inflation. In the error-correction regime it depends on the price-dividend ratio. We find that the probability of regime-switch depends on exogenous inflation and lagged price. The model is consistent with Shleifer and Vishny's theoretical noise trader and arbitrageur model and Modigliani's inflation illusion phenomenon. The results emphasize the importance of inflation and the price-dividend ratio when assessing investment risk.     

Effectiveness of alternative channels of monetary policy transmission: some evidence for India

In this article, we have employed ‘shutdown’ methodology, not used before in the Indian context, to study the relative importance of alternative channels of monetary policy transmission. We have, for the first time, studied the impact of monetary policy on consumer price index (CPI) inflation. In response to a shock to the operating target, the maximum decline in gross domestic product growth occurs with a lag of two to three quarters, while the impact on inflation (both CPI and wholesale price index) is felt with a lag of three to four quarters. The interest rate channel is found to be the most dominant channel of monetary policy transmission in India.