Designing Fiscal Institutions in a Monetary Union

This article explores the policy and wealth consequences of alternative institutional arrangements through which fiscal policy interacts with monetary policy in a monetary union such as the EMU. The central issue of the article is the design of the appropriate monetary and fiscal institutions through a comparison of alternative arrangements to distribute power over monetary and fiscal authorities between the central authority of the union and the individual members of the union and evaluating their performance. The main results of this article reveal that delegation of the fiscal policy to a council of country representatives and the monetary policy to a council of governors is the appropriate institutional design to reduce inflation bias and better stabilize regional, idiosyncratic supply and demand shocks in a monetary union.     

Bailouts,Inflation, and Risk-Sharing in Monetary Unions

This paper presents a new rationalization for bailouts of sovereign debt in monetary unions, such as those observed during the recent Euro crisis. It introduces a model where member countries of the monetary union are ex-ante identical, and each derives utility from consumption and disutility from the union-wide inflation rate. The union’s central bank is utilitarian and lacks commitment. Countries borrow or save in a market for nominal sovereign debt in response to idiosyncratic income shocks, with countries that receive positive income shocks saving and countries that receive negative income shocks borrowing. Ex post, the monetary union’s central bank will attempt to devalue sovereign debt through surprise inflation, as this will redistribute income from rich creditor countries to poor debtor countries. Creditor countries choose to bailout debtor countries because bailouts will weaken the redistributive motives of the central bank and forestall surprise inflation. As bailouts in this environment constitute a payment from lucky creditor countries to unlucky debtor countries, they mimic a risk-sharing arrangement that insures against income shocks. The payments made by creditor countries are incentive-compatible due to the shared currency and inflation rate in the monetary union. This ability of countries to provide each other with incentive-compatible insurance constitutes a novel theory of optimal currency areas. This insurance benefit of the monetary union is largest for countries with negatively correlated income shocks, in contrast to the classic Mundell-Friedman optimal currency area criterion.

     

A Macroeconomic Policy Game for a Monetary Union with Adaptive Expectations

We consider a dynamic game model of a two-country monetary union. Governments (fiscal policies) pursue national goals while the common central bank’s monetary policy aims at union-wide objectives. For a symmetric demand shock, we derive numerical solutions of the dynamic game between the governments and the central bank. We consider conflicting (non-cooperative Nash equilibrium) and coordinated policy-making (cooperative Pareto solutions). We show that there is a trade-off between the deviations of instruments and targets from desired paths; the volatility of output and inflation increases when private agents react more strongly to changes in actual inflation.     

Uncertainty and Fiscal Policy in an Asymmetric Monetary Union

We examine monetary and fiscal interactions in a monetary union model with uncertainty due to imperfect central bank transparency. It is first shown that monetary uncertainty discourages excessive taxation and may thus reduce average inflation and output distortions. However, as countries enter the monetary union, this tax-restraining effect of uncertainty is mitigated. The monetary union may hence lead to higher fiscal distortions in some member countries, depending on governments’ spending targets and on the change in the degree of uncertainty implied by common monetary policy.     

Fiscal and monetary policy in a monetary union: Credible inflation targets or monetized debt?

Fiscal and Monetary Policy in a Monetary Union: Credible Inflation Targets or Monetized Debt? —The paper examines the interrelationship between fiscal and monetary policy in a two-country monetary union. The worst scenario occurs when an independent central bank sets the nominal interest rate and responds to rising government debt/GDP ratios by monetization. The result is high inflation, high debt/GDP ratios and a large public sector. Government debt and inflation are contained if the governments bear sole responsibility for solvency, but the public sector remains excessively large. The best scenario occurs if the central bank removes the incentive for the governments to engineer surprise inflation by credible inflation targeting.     

The Tragedy of the Commons and Inflation Bias in the Euro Area

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically in some of the Euro Area member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and (ii) a common pool problem in a monetary union. We illustrate that the interaction of the two elements leads to an inflation bias that is independent of the standard time-inconsistency bias. Secondly, we present an institutional analysis that is consistent with the view of fragmented monetary policy and empirical evidence that illustrates the heterogeneity of central bank credit expansion.     

THE SENSITIVITY OF SOUTH AFRICAN INFLATION EXPECTATIONS TO SURPRISES

Price stability is widely recognised as the primary goal of modern monetary policy, and the management of private sector inflation expectations has become an essential channel through which this goal is achieved. This evaluation aims to improve the understanding of how the sensitivity of private sector inflation expectations to macroeconomic surprises in South Africa compares internationally, as this provides an indication of the contribution of monetary policy in South Africa to anchoring inflation expectations. If a central bank is credible, the financial markets should react less sensitively to macroeconomics surprises, because they trust the central bank to manage these incidents and achieve the objectives they communicated over the medium to long term. In this paper, the methodology of Gurkaynack et al. is adopted in order to measure the sensitivity of South African inflation expectations to surprises. A comparison of South Africa's results with those of countries in the original studies supports the contention that the SARB (South African Reserve Bank) has encouraged inflation expectations to be relatively insensitive to macroeconomic surprises, and offers support for the inflation-targeting framework as a means to help anchor inflation expectations.     

Monetary Policy Committee Transparency: Measurement,Determinants, and Economic Effects

This paper studies monetary policy committee transparency (MPCT) based on a new index that measures central bankers’ educational and professional backgrounds as disclosed through central bank websites. Based on a novel cross-sectional data set covering 75 central banks, we investigate the determinants of MPCT as well as its economic consequences. We find that past inflation, institutional indicators, and monetary policy strategy are important determinants of MPCT. MPCT has a robust and significantly negative impact on inflation variability and inflation expectations, even after controlling for important macroeconomic variables and institutional transparency, as well as instrumenting MPCT in various ways. MPCT can be both a complement to and a substitute for institutional transparency.     

Fiscal-monetary Interactions: The Effect of Fiscal Restraint and Public Monitoring on Central Bank Credibility

This paper offers new insights into the interactions between private agents, the government, and a central bank, and their effect on the outcomes of monetary policy. In a simple game theoretic model we show that, unless there is public monitoring, impatient governments will be tempted to override or outmaneuver the central bank and create surprise inflation to boost output. This both undermines the government’s reputation for sound fiscal policies and reduces the central bank’s credibility. The result is not only higher and more volatile inflation but also sub-optimal output. More importantly, it is also shown that this is likely to occur even if the central banker is fully independent and the government is always patient. In contrast, if the public monitors sufficiently carefully, the central bank is never overridden and monetary policy can be credible even under an impatient government. We derive the general conditions under which each scenario occurs and then relate them to the developments in central banking over the past two decades, most notably to the trends towards greater independence, explicit inflation targeting, clearer communication and transparency. Interestingly, transparency is shown to reduce the variability of both inflation and output (by reducing the monitoring cost and making public monitoring more likely) which is in contrast to the usual transparency literature with a single policymaker which supposes a transparency-volatility trade-off.

中国货币政策的福利损失与政策规则选择——基于新凯恩斯DSGE模型的分析

本文在新凯恩斯主义DSGE模型框架下,运用福利损失函数和脉冲响应方法研究我国最优货币政策规则选择的问题。研究结果表明,货币供应量规则相对于利率规则,使外生冲击对产出和通货膨胀的影响更持久,造成更大的福利损失,因此中央银行的货币政策规则应该逐步从货币供应量规则转向利率规则;在一定条件下,前瞻型利率规则、后顾型利率规则和泰勒规则所造成的福利损失相差不大,从便利的角度出发,中央银行应该选择后顾型利率规则。     

Credibility and monetary policy in a model with growth

We examine the implications for monetary policy design of includinglearning-by-doing effects in a macroeconomic model. We showthat an inflation bias arises because monetary surprises maybe exploited to maximise potential output by temporarily raisingthe rate of human capital accumulation. Our model also providesan alternative explanation for the empirical evidence linkinginflation and growth, where the causal link goes from slow growthto high inflation. Unlike traditional credibility models, aninflationary bias can persist even when the authorities do notwish to offset labour market distortions through monetary surpriseswhich undercut the median voter's income.     

Monetary Policy Uncertainty and Inflation: The Role of Central Bank Accountability

We analyse the issue of central bank accountability with the aid of a simple monetary policy game with uncertainty about the agent's inflation stabilisation preferences. We find that there may be an important economic role for accountability in addition to its political function of making the central bank answerable to voters through its accountability to the executive. The model suggests that for countries with relatively little central bank independence, or perhaps a poor inflationary track record, significant reductions in inflation can be achieved by lowering monetary policy uncertainty. These reductions are much smaller for inflation-averse central banks, when monetary policy uncertainty is reduced by the same absolute amount. Thus, the effectiveness of accountability – as a means of lowering both inflation and inflation uncertainty – is higher the lower the degree of central bank conservativeness.     

Reactions to Shocks and Monetary Policy Regimes: Inflation Targeting Versus Flexible Currency Board in Sub‐Saharan Africa

The paper examines the monetary policy actions through which central banks in sub‐Saharan Africa have tried to eliminate the negative impacts of the shocks facing their economies. We compare two different monetary policy regimes: a currency board regime (in the CFA zone) and an inflation targeting policy regime (Ghana and South Africa) when central banks respond to demand, supply, and fiscal shocks. We extend the usual forecasting and policy analysis system models to replicate the economic features of these economies during the period 2002–12 and to evaluate the impact of several policies in response to these shocks. We find that both policies are inappropriate in helping the economies escape from the effects of negative demand shocks, both are essential when negative shocks to primary balance occur, while inflation targeting dominates the currency board regime as a strategy to cope with positive shocks to inflation.     

STAGFLATIONARY CONSEQUENCES OF PRUDENT MONETARY POLICY IN A UNIONIZED ECONOMY

Stylised models of the policy game between monetary policy makersand the private sector have suggested that discretionary policyregimes suffer from an inherent inflationary bias and that pre-commitmentto a target rate of inflation may be desirable. This paper showsthat in the presence of labour unions, the monetary policy gamecan lead to radically different results: a central bank thatis completely indifferent to the level of inflation may obtainoutcomes with high employment rates and zero inflation while‘prudent’, inflation-averse, central banks generatestagflation with positive inflation and low rates of employment.     

Inflation targeting in India: A comparison with the multiple indicator approach

The empirical literature on identification and measurement of the impact of monetary policy shocks on the real side of the economy is fairly comprehensive for developed economies, but very limited for emerging and transition economies. In this study, we propose an identification scheme for a developing economy (taking India as a case study), which is able to capture the monetary transmission mechanism for that economy without giving rise to empirical anomalies. Using a VAR approach with recursive contemporaneous restrictions, we identify monetary policy shocks by modelling the reaction function of the central bank and structure of that economy. The effect of monetary policy shocks on the exchange rate and other macroeconomic variables is consistent with the predictions of a broad set of theoretical models. This set-up is used to build a hypothetical case of inflation targeting where the monetary policy instrument is set after assessing the current values of inflation only. This is in contrast with the ‘multiple indicator approach’ currently followed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The results in this study suggest that the demand effects of interest rate are stronger than the exchange rate effects. There is also evidence of the mitigation of potential conflict between exchange rate and interest rate, one of main monetary policy dilemmas of the RBI in inflation targeting.     

货币政策规则非对称性及其在我国的检验

 基于最优货币政策规则的研究框架,本文从非线性总供给曲线和中央银行非对称偏好的角度来阐述货币政策规则中非对称性的理论形成,并利用GMM方法估计和检验了我国货币政策反应函数中的非对称性。研究结果表明非线性总供给曲线可以作为解释我国货币政策非对称反应的一种来源,更重要的是,中央银行对通胀缺口存在负向偏好,且这种负向的通胀偏好可以很好地解释我国“后金融危机时代”的通货膨胀偏差,但对产出缺口的非对称偏好并不显著。此外,不同通胀目标的稳健性研究表明,中央银行都存在负向的通胀偏好,而且该负向偏好随着通胀目标的降低而逐渐减弱。     

Introducing Instruments of Central Bank Accountability in a Monetary Union

With an increasing number of independent central banks, accountability of central banks is also getting more attention. This paper analyses the possibility of introducing instruments of central bank accountability in a monetary union. In our model, monetary policy is influenced by the governments of the member states according to the degree of independence granted to the central bank. Instruments of democratic accountability are introduced which generate different expected losses for a government. The amount of the expected loss will determine the approval of a government to the implementation of a particular mechanism. We show that the agreement between the governments will only be unanimous for the definition of the inflation target of the central bank.

Monetary Policy in Estimated Models of Small Open and Closed Economies

This paper compares monetary policy effects in New-Keynesian models of small open and closed economies fit to Canada. A monetary policy rule allows the central bank to systematically manage the nominal interest rate in response to inflation, output, and money growth variations. The structural parameters of a small open-economy (SOE) and a closed-economy (CE) models are estimated using a maximum-likelihood procedure with a Kalman filter. Estimation results show that the SOE and CE models lead to qualitatively similar estimates for the Canadian economy. Also, the effects of monetary policy shocks, and of other domestic shocks, generated in the SOE model resemble to those generated in the CE model. In addition, the forecast-error decomposition shows that foreign shocks account for small fractions of the variability observed in Canadian macroeconomic variables.     

China's monetary policy surprises and corporate real investment

We evaluate the effect of China's monetary policy shocks on corporate real investment. We propose a new approach to identify China's monetary policy shocks using high-frequency surprises based on treasury futures around monetary policy announcements as external instruments. We then estimate the dynamic effect of monetary policy shocks on corporate real investment using a rich firm-level data of all listed non-financial firms in China. We find that an unexpected monetary policy easing boosts firms' investment expenditures with heterogeneous dynamic responses across firms: small-sized firms have quicker responses than large-sized firms, especially for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). We show that sales revenue response could be the channel through which monetary policy shock transmits to non-SOEs' investment expenditures in China.     

Transatlantic Trade-Offs in the Age of Balanced Budgets and European Monetary Union

We develop a model of monetary and fiscal policies appropriate for considering U.S.-European policy interactions in an era of near-balanced budgets and European monetary union. We study the determinants of policy trade-offs and incentives for central banks and governments across the Atlantic. Smaller, more open economies face more favorable trade-offs, since openness enhances policy effectiveness via the exchange-rate channel. Changes in Europe's monetary arrangements do not affect U.S. trade-offs, although they alter the trade-offs facing European policy-makers. Fiscal trade-offs depend crucially on the extent to which fiscal policy is distortionary. Changes in taxes and spending move both employment and inflation in the desired direction following a worldwide supply shock when spending is financed with distortionary taxes.