Deconstructing credibility: The breaking of monetary policy rules in Brazil

Can political interference deconstruct credibility that was hardly-earned through successful stabilization policy? We analyze the recent switch in the conduct of monetary policy by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). Brazil is the largest Emerging Market Economy to formally target inflation, having adopted the Inflation Targeting (IT) regime in 1999. In the early years of IT, the BCB engaged in constructing credibility with price setting agents and succeeded to anchor inflation expectations to its target even under adverse conditions such as exchange rate crises. We argue that this effort to maintain IT rules-based policy ended in 2011, as a new country president and BCB board came to power. We then discuss the consequences of this credibility loss. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) we provide strong empirical evidence of the BCB’s shift toward looser, discretionary policy after 2011; (ii) preliminary evidence suggests that this shift has affected agents’ inflation expectations generating social and economic costs.     

货币政策可信度的理论分析

货币政策可信度是指经济主体相信中央银行采取系统性的行动以最终达到所承诺的政策目标.如果公众相信中央银行将言行一致地进行货币政策操作,那么这样的货币政策就是可信的.市场经济中,货币政策的可信度在很大程度上影响到货币政策的效率.因此,明确货币政策可信度的涵义,分析货币政策可信度的影响因素,致力于提高货币政策可信度的制度建设,对提高货币政策的有效性具有现实意义.     

Estimating the impact of monetary policy on income inequality in China

The article estimates the impact of monetary policy on income inequality in China. The empirical time series analysis finds that a battery of monetary indicators and the change in the unemployment rate lead to increases in the Gini coefficient. But only unemployment is statistically significant. The lack of significance of the monetary indicators is robust to running different econometric models using nominal output as an alternative to unemployment. Unemployment’s impact on income inequality is robust to considering a fiscal policy proxy alongside inflation in the benchmark equation.     

Economic uncertainty and the influence of monetary policy

This paper explores if economic uncertainty alters the macroeconomic influence of monetary policy. We use several measures of U.S. economic uncertainty, and estimate their interaction with monetary policy shocks as identified through structural vector autoregressions. We find that U.S. monetary policy shocks affect economic activity less when uncertainty is high, in line with “real-option” effects from theory. Holding uncertainty constant, the effect on investment is approximately halved when uncertainty is in its top instead of its bottom decile.     

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.     

House prices, consumption, and monetary policy: a financial accelerator approach

We consider a general equilibrium model with frictions in credit markets used by households. In our economy, houses provide housing services to consumers and serve as collateral to lower borrowing cost. We show that this amplifies and propagates the effect of monetary policy shocks on housing investment, house prices and consumption. We also consider the effect of a structural change in credit markets that lowers the transaction costs of additional borrowing against housing equity. We show that such a change would increase the effect of monetary policy shocks on consumption, but would decrease the effect on house prices and housing investment.     

Endogenous objectives and the evaluation of targeting rules for monetary policy

Recent research in monetary economics has followed the advice of McCallum [1988. Robustness properties of a rule for monetary policy. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 29, 173-203] and investigated the robustness properties of monetary policy rules by evaluating them in a variety of models. Evaluation across models is typically based on an exogenously specified loss function. However, the theory on which many recent monetary policy models are based implies that changes in the structure of the model also have consequences for the policy objectives the central bank should pursue. Objectives are endogenous, not exogenous to the model. In this paper, I investigate the impact of endogenous objectives on the evaluation of targeting rules for monetary policy.     

Loss aversion and the asymmetric transmission of monetary policy

There is widespread evidence that monetary policy exerts asymmetric effects on output over contractions and expansions in economic activity, while price responses display no sizeable asymmetry. To rationalize these facts we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where households’ utility depends on consumption deviations from a reference level below which loss aversion is displayed. State-dependent degrees of real rigidity and elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption generate competing effects on output and inflation. Contractions face the Central Bank with higher responsiveness of output to interest rate changes, as well as a flatter aggregate supply schedule.     

Futures prices as risk-adjusted forecasts of monetary policy

Many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets’ expectations of future monetary policy. However, to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia, these measures require some adjustment. In this paper, we document that excess returns on federal funds futures have been positive on average and strongly countercyclical. In particular, excess returns are surprisingly well predicted by macroeconomic indicators such as employment growth and financial business-cycle indicators such as Treasury yield spreads and corporate bond spreads. Excess returns on eurodollar futures display similar patterns. We document that simply ignoring these risk premia significantly biases forecasts of the future path of monetary policy. We also show that risk premia matter for some futures-based measures of monetary policy shocks used in the literature.     

Learning and the monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank

This paper examines the welfare implications of alternative inflation targeting proposals for the monetary policy of the European Central Bank. We assume that policy makers have to “learn” the laws of motion of inflation in an economy characterized by “stickiness” in domestic price setting behavior and subjected to recurring shocks to productivity, exports and foreign price. We find that a switch from an “asymmetric” inflation targeting strategy to an “symmetric” makes little difference in welfare payoffs, but it comes at a cost of much higher interest-rate variability. We also find that there are practically no welfare gains from switching from an inflation-targeting strategy based on the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) to a strategy based on the domestic price component of the HICP.     

Labor market participation,unemployment and monetary policy

Models of unemployment and monetary policy usually assume constant participation. Incorporating a participation decision into a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions, we show that market tightness becomes endogenously more volatile because both the opportunity cost of home production and the reservation wage vary with participation. The model can simultaneously explain the low volatility of participation, the high volatility of unemployment, and a procyclical workers׳ outside option of working. A policy of strict inflation targeting is close to optimal, and increasing the response of the interest rate to inflation does not have a large impact on the volatility of unemployment because of the endogenous response of participation.     

The impact of conventional and unconventional monetary policy on investor sentiment

This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and investor sentiment across conventional and unconventional monetary policy regimes. During conventional times, we find that a surprise decrease in the fed funds rate leads to a large increase in investor sentiment. Similarly, when the fed funds rate is at its zero lower bound, research results indicate that expansionary unconventional monetary policy shocks also have a large and positive impact on investor mood. Together, our findings highlight the importance of both conventional and unconventional monetary policy in the determination of investor sentiment.     

International monetary policy spillovers through the bank funding channel

In this paper, we examine the international transmission of monetary policies of major advanced economies (US, UK, euro area) through banks in Austria and Germany. In particular, we compare the role of banks’ funding structure, broken down by country of origin as well as by currency denomination, in the international transmission of monetary policy changes to bank lending. We find weak evidence for inward spillovers through a bank funding channel. The more a bank is funded in US dollars, the more its domestic real sector lending is affected by monetary policy changes in the US. This effect is more pronounced in Germany than in Austria. We do not find evidence for outward spillovers of euro area monetary policy.     

Capital flows and the risk-taking channel of monetary policy

Adjustments in bank leverage act as the linchpin in the monetary transmission mechanism that works through fluctuations in risk-taking. In the international context, we find evidence of monetary policy spillovers on cross-border bank capital flows and the US dollar exchange rate through the banking sector. A contractionary shock to US monetary policy leads to a decrease in cross-border banking capital flows and a decline in the leverage of international banks. Such a decrease in bank capital flows is associated with an appreciation of the US dollar.     

Search and matching frictions and optimal monetary policy

A recent literature has merged the New Keynesian and the search and matching frameworks, which has allowed the former to analyze the joint dynamics of unemployment and inflation. This paper analyzes optimal monetary policy in this kind of hybrid framework. I show that zero inflation is optimal when all wages are Nash bargained in every period and the economy's steady state is efficient. In the more realistic case in which nominal wage bargaining is staggered, a case against price stability arises: in response to real shocks, the central bank should use price inflation so as to avoid excessive unemployment volatility and excessive dispersion in hiring rates. For a plausible calibration, the welfare loss under the zero inflation policy is about three times as large as under the optimal policy.     

The dynamic effects of monetary policy: A structural factor model approach

A structural factor model for 112 US monthly macroeconomic series is used to study the effects of monetary policy. Monetary policy shocks are identified using a standard recursive scheme, in which the impact effects on both industrial production and prices are zero. The main findings are the following. First, the maximal effect on bilateral real exchange rates is observed on impact, so that the “delayed overshooting” puzzle disappears. Second, after a contractionary shock prices fall at all horizons, so that the price puzzle is not there. Finally, monetary policy has a sizable effect on both real and nominal variables.     

Risk,uncertainty and monetary policy

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases both risk aversion and uncertainty, with the former effect being stronger. The result holds in a structural vector autoregressive framework, controlling for business cycle movements and using a variety of identification schemes for the vector autoregression in general and monetary policy shocks in particular. The effect of monetary policy on risk aversion is also apparent in regressions using high frequency data.     

Option-implied expectations in commodity markets and monetary policy

In this paper we estimate the dynamic interactions between option-implied variance and skewness in agricultural commodity markets and monetary policy. Using a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework, we find that an expansionary (contractionary) monetary policy upwardly (downwardly) revises commodity markets’ expectations about the price and volatility path of agricultural products. On the other hand, our empirical analysis reveals that monetary policy does not have a systematic and timely response to sudden changes in option implied expectations of commodity investors. In addition, we provide empirical evidence showing the robust forecasting power of agricultural option-implied information on monetary policy with R² values reaching almost 52%.     

Capital inflows,monetary policy,and financial imbalances

Ahead of the global financial crisis, financial imbalances built up across advanced economies as credit grew and was increasingly funded in wholesale financial markets. This paper investigates empirically three potential drivers of the build-up of these financial imbalances: rising global imbalances (capital flows); loose monetary policy; and inadequate supervision and regulation. We perform panel data regressions for OECD countries from 1999 to 2007 to explore the relative importance of these factors. We find that differences in the build-up of wholesale-funded credit were driven by the strength of capital inflows. Moreover, we document an interaction effect, whereby the effect of inflows on the build-up was amplified where the supervisory and regulatory environment was relatively weak. In contrast, differences in monetary policy did not significantly affect differences across countries in the build-up of these financial imbalances ahead of the crisis.