Monetary policy and credit flows

The paper assesses the impact of monetary policy shocks on credit reallocation and evaluates the importance of theoretical monetary policy transmission mechanisms. Compustat data covering 1974 through 2017 is used to compute quarterly measures of credit flows of borrowing firms. I find that expansionary monetary policy is associated with positive long-term credit creation and credit destruction (i.e. credit reallocation). This impact is larger for financially constrained firms and those that are perceived as relatively risky to the lender. This is predicted by the balance sheet channel of monetary policy and mechanisms that reduce lenders’ risk perceptions and increase the tendency to search for yield.     

Credit channel and flight to quality in emerging markets: evidence from Chile

Empirical evidence of the credit channel of monetary policy often relies on the observance of flight to quality during monetary tightening. The identification assumption is that the typically smaller firms facing financing constraints, are disproportionally affected by the stance of monetary policy. I argue that when credit constrains are widespread, as may be the case in Emerging Markets, flight to quality should not be expected during monetary contractions. Indeed, in my model, among constrained firms, those with tighter financing constraints are less responsive to monetary conditions. I find evidence supporting my model in a sample of firms from the Emerging Market of Chile.     

The impact of (un)conventional expansionary monetary policy on income inequality – lessons from Japan

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the impact of conventional and unconventional monetary policy on income inequality in Japan, using hitherto unexplored data from the Japan Household Panel Survey. Empirical evidence shows that expansionary monetary policy in Japan has contributed to diminishing the gender pay gap through an increase in working time of women relative to men, but also to increasing the education pay gap. These effects may have materialized via the aggregate demand channel and the labour productivity channel. In contrast, expansionary monetary policy has had no significant impact on the development of the age pay gap.     

Welfare effects of monetary policy in an economy with vertical production and trade: An analysis based on the perspective of local currency pricing

By incorporating the factor of firms' asymmetric price setting behavior into the two-country model with vertical production and trade, we analyze how one country's monetary policy affects the welfare of both countries. We show that an expansionary monetary policy has (i) a beggar-thyself effect if the ratio of the non-expanding country's intermediate goods firms that set their export prices in the local currency is significantly low and (ii) a prosper-thy-neighbor effect in our model regardless of the ratio of either country's intermediate goods firms that set their export prices in the local currency.     

货币政策、民营企业投资效率与公司期权价值

本文首先考察了货币政策对民营企业融资约束和投资效率的影响。研究发现,宽松的货币政策减少了民营企业的融资约束,但对投资效率的影响则呈现非线性关系。本文进一步从实物期权的角度考察了货币政策对公司增长与清算期权价值的影响,结果表明:高盈利能力公司的增长期权价值在宽松货币政策时期更大,而低盈利能力公司的清算期权价值在紧缩货币政策时期更高。本文的研究结论有助于理解在不同的货币政策状态下,资本逐利这一经济规律的表现形式;同时,本文的经验证据还有助于从投资效率和公司价值的角度评价宏观经济政策对微观经济实体的影响,从而为决策部门制定恰当的经济政策、促进宏观经济体系的良好运转提供政策性建议。     

The hump-shaped behavior of inflation and a dynamic externality

We propose a general equilibrium model that explains the empirical evidence of the hump-shaped response of inflation to a monetary policy shock. The model replaces backward-looking indexation à la Christiano et al. [2005. Nominal rigidities and the dynamic effect of a shock to monetary policy. Journal of Political Economy 113(1), 1-45] with a dynamic externality into the production function of firms. The model, armed with sticky wages and variable capital utilization, has two offsetting effects on real marginal cost over the business cycle. First, increasing factor prices raise real marginal cost in response to an expansionary monetary policy shock in the intermediate run. Second, a dynamic externality reduces real marginal cost in the short run because it raises productivity in response to an increase in output following the shock. Overall, the resulting short-run decrease and intermediate-run increase in marginal cost replicate the hump-shaped behavior of inflation under purely forward-looking price and wage Phillips curves.     

Effects of monetary and government spending policy on economic inequality

Using detailed micro-level income and expenditure data, we study the effects of monetary and government spending policy shocks on income and expenditure inequality in the US from 1990 to 2018. We find that expansionary monetary and government spending policy shocks systematically decrease income, disposable income and expenditure inequality. There is evidence of time variation on the effects and monetary policy and transfer payment shocks. Various impulse responses suggest that the impacts of the policy shocks increase during and after the Great Recession. The responses of income and expenditures of households at different percentiles suggest that expansionary monetary and government spending policy have a larger positive impact on households with low income and expenditures relative to those at the top of the distribution. We do not find evidence of the significant impact of Quantitative Easing policies on income inequality, however, expenditure inequality appear to increase due to the policies.     

Firm investment and financial conditions in the euro area: evidence from firm-level data

We explore whether the sensitivity of firm-level investment to cash flow, typically associated with an external financing premium, is time-varying and in particular whether it varies with overall financial conditions. We find that financial conditions have indeed played a significant role in corporate investment decisions over recent years, rendering financing constraints even more binding. This finding appears to be robust to a number of control variables and robustness tests. Moreover, the impact of credit conditions is not uniform across firms, but rather it varies depending on firm size and leverage, with constrained firms being substantially more likely to condition their investment decisions on overall credit conditions. Our results cast new light on the interplay between financial and real cycle downturns and underline the need for monetary, fiscal and macroprudential policy to be countercyclical with respect to financial conditions.     

Fiscal policy,macroeconomic performance and industry structure in a small open economy

We analyse how fiscal policy affects both the macroeconomy and the industry structure, using a multi-sector macroeconomic model of the Norwegian economy with an inflation targeting monetary policy. Our simulations show that the magnitude of the government spending and labour tax cut multipliers, whether monetary policy is active or passive, is comparable to what is found in the literature. A novel finding from our simulations is that the industry structure is substantially affected by an expansionary fiscal policy, as value added in the non-traded goods sector increases at the expense of value added in the traded goods sector. Moreover, expansionary fiscal policy reduces the mark-ups in the traded goods sector, while the mark-ups are roughly unchanged in the non-traded goods sector. The contraction of activity in the traded goods sector increases when monetary tightening accompanies the fiscal stimulus. Hence, we find that such a policy mix is likely to produce significant de-industrialization in a small open economy with inflation targeting.     

货币政策与金融资产价格

( 1 )货币政策对金融资产价格 (特别是股票价格 )有影响 ,当投资的上升引起原材料和劳动力价格上涨时 ,扩张性货币政策的长期结果是同时引起商品物价水平和股票价格的上升 ;当投资具有规模经济效应或可以使劳动生产率显著提高时 ,扩张性货币政策的长期结果是股价的上升和物价水平的下降。因此 ,货币数量与通货膨胀的关系不仅取决于商品和服务的价格 ,而且在一定意义上取决于股市。 ( 2 )无论股市财富效应大小 ,通过货币政策刺激股票市场拉动需求的做法在长期都是不可靠的。当股市价格偏离稳态已经越来越远时 ,经济运行将是不安全的。     

Monetary shocks,equity returns and volatility: a firm-level panel data analysis

This article studies the impact of monetary policy shocks on equity returns and their volatility among nine industries and their affiliated firms in the United States. We use an extension of the traditional CAPM as the analytical framework and approximate policy shocks with the unexpected component of the federal funds rate. Data on the characteristics of firms and industries are obtained from Compustat and the Center for Research in Security Prices, covering a sample period from 1987 to 2009. Our results clearly show that responses to policy shocks vary by industry and across firms. Furthermore, credit availability matters in certain industries, and small, financially constrained, and bank-dependent firms are found to be more vulnerable to unexpected federal funds rate shocks.     

Financial structure,productivity, and risk of foreign direct investment

This study investigates how heterogeneous firms choose their lenders when they raise external finance for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and how the choice of financing structure affects FDI activities. We establish an asymmetric information model to analyze why certain firms use private bank loans while others use public bonds to finance foreign production. The hidden information is the productivity shock to FDI. Banks are willing to monitor the risk of FDI, while bondholders are not; hence, banks act as a costly middleman that enables firms to avoid excessive risk. We show that firms’ productivity levels, the riskiness of FDI, and the relative costs of bank finance and bond finance are three key determinants of the firm’s financing choice. Countries with higher productivity, higher bank costs, or investment in less risky destinations, use more bond finance than bank finance. These results are supported by evidence from OECD countries.     

Monetary Policy,Financial Frictions,and Heterogeneous R&D Firms in an Endogenous Growth Model*

Motivated by empirical facts, I construct an endogenous growth model in which heterogeneous research and development (R&D) firms are financially constrained and use cash to finance R&D investments. I also examine the optimal monetary policy. The effects of financial constraint crucially depend on whether R&D firms are homogeneous or heterogeneous regarding R&D productivity. If R&D firms are homogeneous, then the zero nominal interest rate (i.e., the Friedman rule) is always optimal under severe financial constraint. Heterogeneity in R&D productivity leads to the opposite result. With heterogeneity, severe financial constraint makes the strictly positive nominal interest rate welfare-improving under a plausible condition.     

Monetary transmission mechanism with firm turnover

An expansionary monetary policy shock increases the entry rate and the number of firms in the US. A pure sticky price model predicts that the number of firms in the economy should go down after a monetary expansion, but this prediction is at odds with the empirical findings. In marked contrast, the cost channel mechanism generates an increase in the number of firms that is consistent with the data. A key insight is that the greater price stickiness is, the stronger the cost channel needs to be to generate firm dynamics that are consistent with the data.     

Bank-lending channel and non-financial firms: evidence for Spain

During the 1990s, liquidity was relatively abundant in the European Union and the European central banks mostly developed a relaxed monetary policy. While the bank lending channel view of the monetary policy would have suggested an increase in loans to firms in this context, the demand for bank corporate lending, however, slowed down, suggesting that monetary policy was not effective in this area. This article analyses how the financing behaviour of Spanish firms during 1992–2003 is related to their liquidity holdings and how this relationship may affect the effectiveness of the bank lending channel. The empirical evidence provided suggests that firms holding high liquid assets may replace bank lending by other sources of financing. Hence, higher liquidity holdings allow firms to invest in attractive investment projects in the event of a tightening of monetary conditions.      

中国是否存在货币政策非对称性?——基于当前货币政策无效性的探讨

美国金融危机爆发以来,中国经济受到负面影响,为了改善经济不断下行的局面,中国实施宽松的货币政策。在传统的西方货币政策非对称性理论中,扩张性货币政策在经济萧条的流动性陷阱中无效,但是,由于金融体系和货币体系的百年发展,流动性陷阱的条件已经改变。本文通过理论和实证分析论证了由于中国货币政策传导渠道和传导环境的特殊性,当前扩张性货币政策对实体经济有明显的拉动作用。     

Gender discrimination,inflation, and the business cycle

Empirical evidence suggests that women are discriminated against in the labor market. We analyze the effects of taste-based and statistical gender discrimination on business cycle and inflation dynamics by including unpaid household production, two-agent households, and discriminatory firm behavior in a tractable New Keynesian model. After a negative demand shock, we find that the economic downturn is more severe in comparison to a non-discriminatory environment, as the shock implies an increase in the inefficient utilization of female and male productivity. Furthermore, the working time allocation between women and men becomes more inefficient. Moreover, we show that discrimination implies a lower transmission of expansionary monetary policy shocks on inflation. Overall, taste-based discrimination leads to larger macroeconomic distortions, while statistical discrimination implies higher intra-household inefficiencies.     

Monetary policy shocks and productivity measures in the G-7 countries

An implication of two-country international real business cycle models is that total factor productivity should be an exogenous stochastic process. Economic theories which feature labor hoarding, variable capacity utilization, and increasing returns predict that measured productivity shifts are not exogenous; instead, expansionary aggregate demand shocks should lead to an increase in measured productivity. For each of the G-7 countries, this paper measures quarterly aggregate total factor productivity for the domestic country and its rest-of-world (G-6) counterpart. In each case the domestic productivity measures are not strictly exogenous: expansionary U.S. monetary policy shocks, as well as other G-6 monetary policy shocks, lead to productivity expansions. The evidence indicates that international business cycle models are misspecified unless they feature endogenous productivity mechanisms.Received: June 2001, Accepted: December 2001, JEL Classification: E5, F4Correspondence to: Charles L. EvansFor their helpful comments, we thank Mario Crucini, Patricia Reynolds, and Steve Strongin. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve System.     

The effects of future financing constraints on capital accumulation: Some new results on the constrained investment problem

In this paper, we study the effects of future constraints on current investment decisions. Unlike the standard literature on this optimizing problem, we present a model in which firms are neither always constrained nor always unconstrained. We are concerned with those cases where a firm is free from constraints at the current time but expects to face an upper bound at some later date. Using the ‘no arbitrage principle’ in the constrained scenario, we show how to explicitly calculate the optimal investment path switching between regimes. The analytical result shows that the effects of future financing constraints are included in the market value of the firm, and thus are captured by marginal q.     

Financial constraints on investments: A three-pillar approach

Recent theoretical analyses demonstrate how informational asymmetries between financiers and investors may generate credit rationing and positive cost differentials between external and internal financing sources. The traditional empirical approach used to test for the presence of financing constraints at firm level is based on two pillars: a priori identification of relatively more financially constrained firms and econometric estimation of an investment demand function. This approach has been seriously questioned due to several methodological problems. This paper intends to amend it by adding a third pillar: the informational content of direct revelation through qualitative data. The paper estimates a reduced form investment equation following the Euler equation approach, and combines a priori information and direct qualitative information to consistently estimate for each firm the probability of being financially constrained. Our main finding is that when financially constrained firms are properly identified, the neoclassical model is rejected only for unconstrained firms. This indirectly rescues the validity of the Euler equation approach. Moreover, financially constrained firms show a positive correlation between investment and lagged cash flow.