Inferring hawks and doves from voting records

We analyze revealed policy preferences of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. From the voting records we estimate the policy preferences with spatial models of voting. We find that internal committee members tend to hold centrist policy preferences, while more extreme policy preferences, both hawkish and dovish, are generally held by external members. An industry background is associated with more hawkish preferences.     

Optimal monetary policy regime for oil producing developing economies: Implications for post-war Iraq

This paper theoretically investigates optimal monetary policy regime for oil producing developing countries. We analyze credibility and reputation of the Central Bank and macroeconomic dynamics under alternative monetary policy regimes. We construct a detailed and realistic model that can be used to analyze macroecomic structure and expectation dynamics of an oil producing open economy. We take into account the asymmetric information between the public and the central bank and theoretically investigate how this asymmetric information impacts the real economy and the credibility of the central bank. The simulation results indicate that central bank achieves higher credibility and lower inflation under dollarization and higher output levels under currency board regime. The model constructed in this paper has many policy implications for oil producing open economies. Using the implications of the model, we make monetary policy regime recommendations for post-war Iraq.     

Third-party manipulation of conflict: an experiment

We design a laboratory experiment in which an interested third party endowed with private information sends a public message to two conflicting players, who then make their choices. We find that third-party communication is not strategic. Nevertheless, a hawkish message by a third party makes hawkish behavior more likely while a dovish message makes it less likely. Moreover, how subjects respond to the message is largely unaffected by the third party’s incentives. We argue that our results are consistent with a focal point interpretation in the spirit of Schelling.     

The US monetary performance prior to the 2008 crisis

This article uses a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) approach to study the different shocks to the monetary performance in the two decades of the US economy prior to the 2008 financial crisis. By using the Federal Fund Rate as a measure of change in the monetary policy, this study shows that interest rate expectation is informative about the future movement of Federal Fund Rate and the anticipated monetary policy should be one of the crucial reasons in causing monetary and financial deterioration in the US economy. This article discusses a possible conjecture of a low interest rate trap when a persistent and prolonged low interest rate regime led to financial instability.     

Financial distress and fiscal inflation

Is inflation ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ or is it fundamentally a fiscal phenomenon? The answer hinges crucially on the underlying monetary–fiscal policy regime. Scant attention has been directed to the role of credit market frictions in discerning the policy regime, despite its growing importance in empirical macroeconomics. We augment a standard monetary model to incorporate fiscal details and credit market imperfections. These ingredients allow for both interpretations of the inflation process in a financially constrained environment. We find that introducing financial frictions to the model and adding financial variables to the dataset generate important identifying restrictions on the observed pattern between inflation and measures of financial and fiscal stress, to the extent that it overturns existing findings about which monetary–fiscal policy regime produced the U.S. data. To confront policy regime uncertainty, we propose the use of dynamic prediction pools and find strong cyclical patterns in the estimated historical regime weights.     

Even more on monetary policy in a small open economy

It is well known that in a small open economy with full capital mobility and a fixed exchange rate, monetary policy is ineffective in influencing real output (e.g. the works of Fleming [Int. Monetary Fund Staff Pap. 9 (1962) 369.] and Mundell [Can. J. Econ. Polit. Sci. 29 (1963) 475.]). However, Wu [Int. Rev. Econ. Finance 8 (1999) 223.] finds that when the credit channel is added to this model, monetary policy can have real effects under a fixed exchange rate system. This conclusion hinges on the assumption that open market operations have no effect on foreign exchange reserves of the central bank when evaluating how a change in monetary policy affects the loan market. This assumption is incorrect because under a fixed exchange rate regime, the quantity of foreign reserves becomes endogenous in the model. It is shown that when this assumption is relaxed, monetary policy is still ineffective in influencing output under a fixed exchange regime, even with an operative credit channel.     

Is the relationship between monetary policy and house prices asymmetric across bull and bear markets in South Africa? Evidence from a Markov-switching vector autoregressive model

This paper examines asymmetries in the impact of monetary policy on the middle segment of the South African housing market from 1966:M2 to 2011:M12. We use Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) model in which parameters change according to the phase of the housing cycle. The results suggest that monetary policy is not neutral as house price growth decreases substantially with a contractionary monetary policy. We find that the impact of monetary policy is larger in bear regime than in bull regime; indicating the role of information asymmetry in reinforcing the financial constraint of economic agents. As expected, monetary policy reaction to a positive house price shock is found to be stronger in the bull regime. This suggests that the central bank reacts more in bull regime in order to prevent potential crisis related to the subsequent bust in house prices bubbles which are more prominent in bull markets. These results substantiate important asymmetries in the dynamics of house prices in relation to monetary policy, vindicating the advantages of generating regime dependent impulse response functions.     

中间汇率制度下货币、财政政策效应比较及政策建议

蒙代尔-弗莱明模型(M-F模型)研究了固定汇率制和浮动汇率制下财政、货币政策的有效性。将其拓展到中间汇率制度下发现,无论资本的流动性如何,扩张性的财政政策和货币政策基本有效,其效应介于固定汇率制和浮动汇率制的情况之间。实行中间汇率制度的国家在进行宏观调控时,最应该运用财政、货币政策搭配方法,此时政策效果最好。     

汇率-资本流动性的制度安排和财政-货币政策的有效性研究

笔者通过拓广的蒙代尔-弗莱明模型,并突破了传统的"三元冲突"汇率制度安排理论的研究路径,考虑引入资本流动性相对强度系数的概念,又在固定汇率制下引入"冲销"干预政策因素,提出了一个在固定和浮动汇率及不同资本流动性制度安排下财政-货币政策有效性指数曲线的新假说,对汇率-资本流动性制度安排对于宏观经济政策(财政-货币政策)综合有效性的影响问题做了一些较为深入的探讨.笔者认为,我国作为一个经济大国应尽可能地拥有宏观经济政策的自主权,考虑到我国当前金融市场体系尚不够完善,货币政策传导机制还存在严重障碍,所以在近期财政政策的权重应大于货币政策,从而在我国汇率制度改革过程中,为保留宏观经济政策的自主权,在加快放宽人民币汇率弹性的同时必须加强相应的资本管制.     

Adjustment to monetary policy and devaluation under two-tier and fixed exchange rate regimes

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a two-tier exchange rate regime is more effective than a fixed rate regime in increasing a country's ability to pursue an independent monetary policy. The analysis compares adjustment to a monetary policy and to a devaluation in the two exchange rate regimes in a portfolio model under imperfect assets substitutability. It is shown that a two-tier exchange rate regime is capable of reducing the current account effects of monetary injection or devaluation only in the long run. In the short run, however, we can get a larger current account response under a two-tier regime. These results reflect the trade-off between quantity and price adjustment.     

The evolution of the monetary policy regimes in the U.S.

The existing literature on U.S. monetary policy provides no sense of a consensus regarding the existence of a monetary policy regime. This article explores the evolution of U.S. monetary policy regimes via the development of a Markov-switching model predicated on narrative and statistical evidence of a monetary policy regime. We identified five regimes for the period spanning 1956:I?C2005:IV and they roughly corresponded to the Chairman term of the Federal Reserve, except for the Greenspan era. More importantly, we demonstrate that the conflicting results regarding the response to inflation for the pre-Volcker period in the existing literature is not attributable to the different data but due to different samples, and also provided an insight regarding the Great Inflation??namely, that the near non-response to inflation in the early 1960s appears to have constituted the initial seed of the Great Inflation. We also find via analysis of the Markov-switching model for the U.S. real interest rate, that the regime changes in the real interest rate follow the regime changes in monetary policy within 2?years and that the evolution of real interest rate regimes provides a good explanation for the conflicting results regarding the dynamics of real interest rate.     

货币政策透明度指数:理论方法与实证检验

文章通过建立货币政策透明度指数,并利用我国金融市场的利率数据进行检验,认为我国中央银行在基准利率调整和准备金率改变等重大政策决策上,货币当局更倾向于采用模糊的政策操作方式,由此可能会导致市场预期的混乱,并最终对政策实施效果产生负面影响。因此,我国有必要借鉴西方国家的政策操作经验,进一步有选择地增加货币政策操作的透明度,并借以最终建立一个简单透明、效率更高的政策调控框架。     

What's in a second opinion? Shadowing the ECB and the Bank of England

One way of evaluating how well monetary authorities perform is to provide the public with a regular and independent second opinion. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professional and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation in advance of the central bank announcement. In this paper, we systematically evaluate this second opinion and find that, first, the shadow committee of the ECB tends to be relatively less inflation averse than the ECB. In contrast, the shadow committee of the BoE proposes a more hawkish monetary policy stance than the BoE. Second, consensus within a shadow committee is far easier to reach when there is no pressure to change the policy rate. Third, the ECB's shadow committee is more activist than the ECB's Governing Council and a larger degree of consensus within the former brings about a greater likelihood that the two committees will agree.     

Monetary and fiscal policy interactions in the post-war U.S.

A New Keynesian model allowing for an active monetary and passive fiscal policy (AMPF) regime and a passive monetary and active fiscal policy (PMAF) regime is estimated to fit various U.S. samples from 1955 to 2007. The results show that data in the pre-Volcker periods strongly prefer an AMPF regime, even with a prior centered in the PMAF region. The estimation, however, is not very informative about whether the Federal Reserve's reaction to inflation is greater than one in the pre-Volcker period, because much lower values can still preserve determinacy under passive fiscal policy. In addition, whether a PMAF regime can generate consumption growth following a government spending increase depends on the degree of price stickiness. An income tax cut can yield an unusual negative labor response if monetary policy aggressively stabilizes output growth.     

Transparency in monetary policy: A general equilibrium approach

We study a general equilibrium model with a central bank (CB) and two groups of agents, producers and workers. The CB maximizes a weighted average of utilities of the two groups. The CB has two possible types, one favoring workers and the other favoring producers. The CB's type is private information. We compare two possible monetary policy regimes, transparent and opaque. For realistic values of parameters, it is shown that workers are better off under the opaque regime, whereas producers are better off under the transparent regime. This result is shown to hold in two cases, when the range of possible monetary transfers is small and when the range of possible monetary transfers is large.     

基于金融稳定的货币政策框架修正研究

文章构造了一个四期二叉树模型,对货币稳定和金融稳定的关系进行了分析,发现仅以维护货币稳定为目标的货币政策无法同时实现金融稳定。基于此,文章对货币政策框架进行了修正,将货币稳定和金融稳定纳入统一的货币政策框架予以考察,并对我国货币政策的实践进行了实证分析。VAR检验结果表明,银行信贷增长率和房地产价格指数都是我国货币政策应当关注的金融稳定指标。货币政策应根据金融稳定指标进行逆周期调控,调控重点是金融稳定指标预期,而非稳定指标本身。     

Monetary policy and noise traders: A welfare analysis

This paper studies the choice of monetary policy regime in a small open economy with noise traders in forex markets. We focus on two simple rules: fixed exchange rates and inflation targeting. We contrast the above two rules against optimal policy with commitment under productivity shocks. In general, the presence of noise traders increases the desirability of a fixed exchange rate regime. We also evaluate the welfare impact of Tobin taxes in this milieu. These taxes help unambiguously in the absence of productivity shocks; their welfare impact under productivity shocks depends on the monetary regime in place and trade elasticity between domestic and foreign goods.     

Impact of foreign prices and interest rates on canadian economy under alternative monetary and exchange rate regimes

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of U.S. short- and long-term monetary policy under both flexible and managed floating systems, using the new CANDIDE Model 2.0. We have also examined the role of domestic monetary policy in the Canadian economy under both fixed and flexible exchange rate systems. The following are some of the important findings of our study:

1. Our results support the traditional view that under the fixed exchange rate regime, monetary authorities cannot successfully pursue an independent monetary policy from its trading partners — an effort to increase money supply will be almost offset by increases in the balance of payments deficit. In contrast, in the flexible exchange rate regime, monetary policy is more effective in producing an increased growth in output and employment. However the increased output growth comes at the cost of higher prices induced by increased wages and a depreciation of the Canadian dollar.
2. Our results suggest that the impact of U.S. interest rates on investment, GNE, employment, productivity, and government debt is less severe in a pure floating exchange rate regime, compared to the managed floating system. However, the impact of U.S. interest rate policy on the Canadian inflation rate is worse in the case of flexible exchange rate regime. Even though real income and inflation are less favourable in both cases, our results indicate a trade-off between output growth and inflation.
3. Our results imply that under a pure floating monetary authorities can determine the long-run rate of inflation in Canada independent of others. However, the United States and Canadian economies are interrelated during the adjustment process, even under the flexible exchange rates, through the terms of trade and the wage-price spiral channels.

     

美联储量化宽松政策对全球资产价格的非平衡溢出效应

本文采用全局向量自回归模型分析了美联储QE对采用不同货币政策框架、汇率制度和资本流动管理制度国家和地区的不同影响。“货币政策钉住货币供应量+宽松钉住汇率制度+资本账户可兑换”的国家其货币政策应兼顾本国物价水平稳定，同时加强宏观审慎政策对资产价格的逆周期调节，避免出现实体经济紧缩而金融繁荣的现象。“货币政策钉住通货膨胀+浮动汇率+资本账户可兑换”的国家应强化宏观审慎政策对资产价格的调节以应对金融资产泡沫。     

Monetary and Fiscal Policy Interactions in the Euro Area

The problem of monetary and fiscal policy interactions is an important issue for the euro area, since the individual member states of the EMU are responsible for their fiscal policies but monetary policy is pursued by a single monetary authority, the ECB. This paper is concerned with empirical evidence on monetary and fiscal policy interactions in the euro area. We first explore fiscal regimes with a VAR model and find empirical evidence that a non-Ricardian fiscal policy has been pursued in both France and Germany. As an example, we then study how one member state of the EMU, namely, Italy, is responding to the common monetary policy with its fiscal policy and find that Italian fiscal policy seemed to be counteractive to the common monetary policy between 1979 and 1998. In order to study monetary and fiscal policy interactions in a more general way, we explore time-varying interactions by estimating a State-Space model with Markov-switching for some Euro-area countries. There appear to be some regime changes in monetary and fiscal policy interactions in France and Germany, but the interactions between the two policies are not strong. Moreover, the two policies have not been accommodative but counteractive to each other. Finally we explore forward-looking behavior in policy interactions and find that expectations do not seem to have played an important role in the policy designs.