Why do bank loans react with a delay to shifts in interest rates? A bank capital explanation

We advance an explanation for the delay in the response of the volume of bank loans to innovations in monetary policy. Capital requirements may effectively tie the evolution of bank credit to the evolution of bank equity. By uncovering a new mechanism by which shifts in interest rates affect the profitability of the banking sector, and in turn its equity, we find that the resulting movements in the amount of aggregate loans are consistent with the regularities observed in the data.     

Cap and trade policies in the presence of monopoly and distortionary taxation

We extend an analytical general equilibrium model of environmental policy with pre-existing labor tax distortions to include pre-existing monopoly power as well. We show that the existence of monopoly power has two offsetting effects on welfare. First, the environmental policy reduces monopoly profits, and the negative effect on income increases labor supply in a way that partially offsets the pre-existing labor supply distortion. Second, environmental policy raises prices, so interaction with the pre-existing monopoly distortion further exacerbates the labor supply distortion. This second effect is larger, for reasonable parameter values, so the existence of monopoly reduces the welfare gain (or increases the loss) from environmental restrictions.     

(Non)optimality of the Friedman rule and optimal taxation in a growing economy with imperfect competition

This paper shows that if capital generates production externality, there exists a wedge between returns to money and to capital, driving the Friedman rule is not optimal. However, in the absence of capital externality, the Friedman rule may be valid even under imperfect competition.     

Stabilisation, Policy Targets and Unemployment in Imperfectly Competitive Economies

This paper argues that the rate of equilibrium unemployment depends on the objectives of the Central Bank. In a model where the Central Bank uses monetary policy to stabilise the economy, we show that unemployment and inflation will be lower with an inflation target than with targets for output, money or nominal GDP. The intuition for this is that the elasticities of demand in both the product and the labour markets are greater when there is an inflation target; we show that this leads to a lower mark-up of price over marginal cost and makes wages more sensitive to unemployment.     

Specification choice and robustness in CGE trade policy analysis with imperfect competition

In order to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the robustness of the quantitative results of applied trade policy simulations to variations in the assumptions about firm conduct, this article provides a systematic synopsis of alternative formulations of imperfectly competitive supply behaviour in applied general equilibrium trade models and examines the sensitivity of simulated trade policy effects to the specification choice and calibration strategy within a prototype multi-country model. The analysis suggests in particular, that simulation results are generally far more sensitive to numerical specification choices at the calibration stage, than to the prior choice of firm conduct specification.     

Non-existence of Duopoly Equilibria: A Simple Numerical Example

We give a simple example to the non-existence of duopoly equilibrium in pure strategies in an economy with two goods and two types of consumers. This extends also the discussion on the incentive for trade in an oligopolistic framework initiated in Cordella and Gabszewicz (1998).     

Increasing returns,entrepreneurship and imperfect competition

We study a simple bilateral oligopoly model in which individual agents, who are initially endowed with capital, decide sequentially (1) whether they want to act as producers (entrepreneurs) or as capital lenders (rentiers) and, then (2) which quantity of capital they would like to borrow or lend, though exchange of capital units against units of the produced good. Production takes place under increasing returns to scale. We show the existence of “natural equilibria”, at which wealthier capital owners become entrepreneurs while the remaining ones decide to be rentiers. We also study the efficiency of equilibria which is shown to increase by replication of the economy, but sometimes to decrease as a consequence of wealth redistribution.We thank an anonymous referee for his insightful comments     

The welfare cost of imperfect competition and distortionary taxation

The welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product and labor markets in the United States is quantified in a dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that the welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product market is 3.62 percent while it is 0.58 percent in the labor market, taking the transition path from the distorted to the optimal steady state into account. If we also take into account that the US economy is characterized by distortionary taxation, the welfare cost of the product market distortion increases to 13.51 percent and the labor market distortion to 4.35 percent.     

货币政策有效性与货币政策透明制度的兴起

本文着重探讨货币政策透明性与货币政策有效性之间的关系,目的在于说明货币政策透明制度能够兴起的一个关键因素在于货币政策的透明性有利于提高货币政策的有效性。在标准的“时间不一致性”理论里面,货币政策是否透明对货币政策的效应是没有影响的,因为在这类理论里面,经济主体能够使用所有可获得的信息形成与经济系统相一致的、无偏的估计。但问题的关键在于,这种假设的基本前提在实践中并不完全成立。当考虑到经济主体对经济运行结果和经济运行过程的不完全认知时,货币政策透明性对于促进经济主体的学习过程,稳定和引导公众的通胀预期,进而提高货币政策的有效性就起着至关重要的作用。     

Buchanan on monetary constitutions

Buchanan’s reflections on monetary issues have been mostly neglected, despite their great interest both per se and for a deeper understanding of his general constitutional endeavour. We will thus propose a comprehensive assessment of Buchanan’s writings on this topic, focusing in particular on the different political models that have been developed to argue in favour of constitutional constraints on the governmental power to create money and on the implications that one can draw from our author’s monetary papers for the structure and the objectives of his constitutional discourse more generally.

关于“双顺差”背景下实现中国内外均衡的思考

内外均衡目标是指充分就业、物价稳定、经济增长及国际收支均衡。目前，中国正面临通货紧缩的压力和国际收支双顺差的格局，因此需通过扩张性的财政及货币政策进行协调，同时辅以汇率及利率政策。只有内外兼顾统一才能使经济实现稳定发展。     

Monetary policy design and transmission asymmetry in EMU: Does uncertainty matter?

In this paper, we consider how uncertainty affects the choice between federal monetary policy based on national and union-wide aggregate data under conditions of asymmetry in the transmission of monetary policy. We find that the uncertainty about the transmission process sustains (and, in some cases, even reinforces) the need to take into account information about national economies in the formulation of monetary policy. Also the forecasting process matters when uncertainty is additive: in particular, when union-wide forecasting is more accurate than national-based forecasting, this advantage can compensate for the welfare loss from using union-wide aggregation. There is, however, a strong case for using national information in the optimal design of common monetary policy.     

MISPERCEPTIONS AND MONETARY POLICY IN A NEW-KEYNESIAN MODEL

This paper studies the consequences for the monetary policy design of information shortages on the part of the private sector. We model these shortages as exogenous shocks to expected income, which through an IS curve, disturb aggregate demand. We constrain policymakers to follow Taylor‐like rules but allow them to optimise coefficients: we find that the presence of misperceptions makes the optimised Taylor rule respond more aggressively to inflation and the output gap. We also find that if the policymaker is uncertain about misperceptions, then it is less costly to assume they are pervasive when they are not than the reverse. In other words, setting policy on the basis that the private sector is subject to misperceptions is a ‘robust’ policy.     

International Trade, Bargaining and Efficiency: The Holdup Problem

In the presence of product market imperfections and holdup, we identify allocative and productive efficiency gains resulting from international trade. Under a bilateral monopoly in a closed economy, inefficiencies arise in both input and output markets. Trade in final goods has a procompetitive effect in the product market. This in turn triggers an increase in output, which raises incentives for the upstream firm to invest and helps reduce the hold-up problem.
JEL classification: F 12; F 13; F 15     

On the optimality of the full-cost pricing

This article is aimed at defining the full-cost pricing as a leader-follower game in two-tier organizations: (i) the upstream unit fixes the production capacity and uses it as a cost driver to compute the average cost; (ii) the downstream unit operates on the market and chooses the output level on the basis of the average cost. In the Cournot oligopoly case, the full-cost pricing is compared with other pricing rules. There exists a wide range of values of the fixed cost, for which the full-cost pricing dominates any other pricing rules, in terms of gross profit.     

Discretionary policy in a monetary union with sovereign debt

This paper examines the interactions between multiple national fiscal policymakers and a single monetary policy maker in response to shocks to government debt in some or all of the countries of a monetary union. We assume that national governments respond to excess debt in an optimal manner, but that they do not have access to a commitment technology. This implies that national fiscal policy gradually reduces debt: the lack of a commitment technology precludes a random walk in steady-state debt, but the need to maintain national competitiveness avoids excessively rapid debt reduction. If the central bank can commit, it adjusts its policies only slightly in response to higher debt, allowing national fiscal policy to undertake most of the adjustment. However, if it cannot commit, then optimal monetary policy involves using interest rates to rapidly reduce debt, with significant welfare costs. We show that in these circumstances the central bank would do better to ignore national fiscal policies in formulating its policy.