Comparative statics of a two-country capital/money model

This paper presents a two country version of James Tobin's capital/money model, with international trade and capital transactions. The model is used to derive comparative static properties of financial market equilibrium under four alternative regimes: fixed or flexible exchange rates combined with a pegged foreign government interest rate or a fixed supply of foreign government debt. The comparative static results derived by Tobin for a closed economy, and by William Branson for a small country with an open economy, are preserved in the model developed here only in the case where both the exchange rate and the foreign interest rate are pegged. The reasons for this are explored.     

Financial capital movements and central bank behavior in a two-country,short-run portfolio balance model

This paper analyzes financial capital movements in a two-country, short-run, portfolio balance model which includes two securities that are imperfect substitutes. Following a disturbance, equilibrium is, in general, reattained, but the effects on interest rates, money supplies, and international reserve holdings depend on the monetary and reserve asset management policies of the two central banks. Special attention is focused on the case in which one central bank holds its international reserves in the form of ‘key currency’ securities, thereby sterilizing for the ‘key currency’ country. There are several applications of the central result that, for any disturbance, the less changes in international reserves are allowed to affect money supplies, the larger the change in reserves required to reestablish equilibrium.     

Monetary policy and inferential expectations of exchange rates

We present a macroeconomic market experiment to isolate the impact of monetary shocks on the exchange rate, as an alternative to SVAR identification. In a non-stochastic treatment, covered interest rate parity holds and predicted exchange rates are tracked well. In a stochastic treatment, we model expectations using a Neyman–Pearson hypothesis test (inferential expectations) and find evidence of belief conservatism and uncovered interest rate parity failure. The market environment magnifies belief conservatism, which is opposite to the standard claim that markets tend to eliminate individual choice anomalies.     

Monetary policy implementation and overnight rate persistence

Overnight money market rates are the predominant operational target of monetary policy. As a consequence, central banks have redesigned the implementation of monetary policy to keep the deviations of the overnight rate from the key policy rate small and short-lived. This paper uses fractional integration techniques to explore how the operational framework of four major central banks affects the persistence of overnight rates. Our results suggest that a well-communicated and transparent interest rate target of the central bank is a particularly important condition for a low degree of overnight rate persistence.     

Interest rate deregulation: Monetary policy efficacy and rate rigidity

This paper examines the effects of interest rate regulation, and subsequent deregulation, on the efficacy of monetary policy and rigidity of retail bank deposit rates in Hong Kong. Using an error-correction model, we find that interest rate deregulation increases the efficacy of monetary policy by improving the correlation between retail bank deposit rates and market interest rates and increasing the degree of long-term pass-through for retail bank deposit rates. Our study also shows that the adjustments in retail bank deposit rates are asymmetric and rigid upwards during the regulated period, but tend to be rigid downwards during the deregulated period. The spreads between retail bank deposit rates and market rates have also tightened sharply after the removal of interest rate controls.     

Monetary policy implementation and the federal funds rate

This paper investigates how the implementation of monetary policy affects the dynamics and the volatility of the federal funds rate. Since the early 1980s, the most important changes in the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy refer to the role of the federal funds rate target and the reserve requirement system. We show that the improved communication and transparency regarding the federal funds rate target has significantly increased the Fed’s influence on the federal funds rate since 1994. By contrast, the declining role of required reserves in the US has contributed to higher federal funds rate volatility. Our results suggest that the introduction of remunerated required reserves will further enhance the controllability of the federal funds rate.     

Monetary and exchange rate stability in South and East Asia

Regaining exchange rate stability has been a major monetary policy goal of East Asian countries in the aftermath of the 1997/98 currency crisis. While most countries have abstained from re-establishing a formal US Dollar peg, they have typically managed the US Dollar exchange rate de facto. We show that most of these countries were able to regain their monetary credibility within a relatively short time period. The Argentine crisis in 2001 caused a minor setback in this process for some countries. We measure the credibility of monetary policy by separating the fundamental and excess volatility of the exchange rate on the basis of a chartist-fundamentalist model. The degree of excess volatility is interpreted as the ability of the central bank to manage the exchange rate via the coordination channel.     

Home bias,exchange rate disconnect,and optimal exchange rate policy

This paper examines how much the central bank should adjust the interest rate in response to real exchange rate fluctuations. The paper first demonstrates, in a two-country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model, that home bias in consumption is important to replicate the exchange rate volatility and exchange rate disconnect documented in the data. When home bias is high, the shock to Uncovered Interest rate Parity (UIP) can substantially drive up exchange rate volatility while leaving the volatility of real macroeconomic variables, such as GDP, almost untouched. The model predicts that the volatility of the real exchange rate relative to that of GDP increases with the extent of home bias. This relation is supported by the data. A second-order accurate solution method is employed to find the optimal operational monetary policy rule. Our model suggests that the monetary authority should not seek to vigorously stabilize exchange rate fluctuations. In particular, when the central bank does not take a strong stance against the inflation rate, exchange rate stabilization may induce substantial welfare loss. The model does not detect welfare gain from international monetary cooperation, which extends Obstfeld and Rogoff's [Obstfeld, M., Rogoff, K.,2002. Global implications of self-oriented national monetary rules, Quarterly Journal of Economics May, 503–535] findings to a DSGE model.     

Monetary policy under model and data-parameter uncertainty

Empirical Taylor rules are much less aggressive than those derived from optimization-based models. This paper analyzes whether accounting for uncertainty across competing models and (or) real-time data considerations can explain this discrepancy. It considers a central bank that chooses a Taylor rule in a framework that allows for an aversion to the second-order risk associated with facing multiple models and measurement-error configurations. The paper finds that if the central bank cares strongly enough about stabilizing the output gap, this aversion leads to significant declines in the coefficients of the Taylor rule even if the central bank's loss function assigns little weight to reducing interest rate variability. Furthermore, a small degree of aversion can generate an optimal rule that matches the empirical Taylor rule.     

Monetary disequilibria and the euro/dollar exchange rate

Although stable money demand functions are crucial for the monetary model of the exchange rate, empirical research on exchange rates and money demand is more or less disconnected. This paper tries to fill the gap for the euro/dollar exchange rate. We investigate whether monetary disequilibria provided by the empirical literature on US and European money demand functions contain useful information about exchange rate movements. Our results suggest that the empirical performance of the monetary exchange rate model improves when insights from the money demand literature are explicitly taken into account.     

Identifying monetary policy in a small open economy under flexible exchange rates

Previous empirical study on the effects of monetary policy shocks in small open economies has generated puzzling dynamic responses in various macroeconomic variables. This paper argues that these puzzles derive from an identification of monetary policy that is inappropriate for such economies. To remedy this, it is proposed that a structural model be estimated to explicitly account for the features of the small open economy. Such a model is applied to Canada with tightly estimated results overall. The dynamic responses to the identified monetary policy shock are consistent with standard theory and highlight the exchange rate as a transmission mechanism.     

Fiscal shocks and spillovers in a dynamic two-country model

International Tax and Public Finance - This paper examines the cross-border effects of domestic fiscal shocks on foreign economic activities by constructing a two-country general equilibrium model....     

Monetary policy,government control and capital investment: Evidence from China

This study examines how the relationships between local governments and local enterprises moderate the effect of targeted monetary policies through different action-propagating mechanisms. First, we investigate the impact of monetary policies on enterprise investment in areas with different institutional environments. Second, we investigate the impact of monetary policies on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with different property rights structures. Third, we examine how political connections can influence the action-propagating mechanism of monetary policies. We conclude that in China monetary policies have different effects on SOEs and on private enterprises with or without political connections. Specifically, local government interventions can significantly weaken and distort the effects of monetary policies, such that the intended reduction in investment is noticeably alleviated for SOEs and private enterprises with close links to local governments.     

Convergence,capital accumulation and the nominal exchange rate

This paper develops a flexible price, two-sector growth model with a nominal side to study the role of the exchange rate in transition dynamics. We adopt a standard small open economy model with traded and nontraded goods, where the engines of growth are exogenous productivity improvements and capital accumulation. We enhance this standard framework by adding a preference for real money holdings, captured by money-in-the-utility. We follow Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (2003) and assume that the interest rate on bonds issued by the small open economy is debt-dependent, and interpret it as a simple financial friction. We show analytically that the choice of the exchange rate regime influences the transition dynamics of a small open economy through the balance sheet of the central bank. We then calibrate the model to explore the quantitative significance of our results. We find that the choice of the exchange rate regime has significant and lasting effects on prices, consumption, investment and sectoral allocations, and the composition of financial assets.     

Monetary policy, secrecy, and federal funds rate behavior

The behavior of the Federal Reserve System can be characterized as secretive. One common justification for this secrecy is the financial markets will overreact to information, causing undue variability in interest rates. This paper examines the credibility of this assertion under the post-October 1979 non-borrowed reserves operating procedure. The major result is that conditional on this operating procedure secrecy can reduce the variability of the federal funds rate. However, in a result analogous to Barro (1976), secrecy raises the variance of the forecasting error of the federal funds rate.     

Real exchange rate persistence and monetary policy rules

The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects of alternative monetary rules on real exchange rate persistence. Using a two-country stochastic dynamic general equilibrium with nominal price stickiness and local currency pricing, we will show how the persistence of purchasing power parity deviations can be related to a monetary theory of these deviations. When monetary policy lean against the wind, there is no relationship of proportionality between the time during which prices remain sticky and the persistence of the response of the real exchange rate: in this case high nominal price rigidity is not sufficient, per se, in generating any persistence following a monetary shock. Moreover, we emphasize the role of interest rates smoothing policies and relative price stickiness within countries in understanding the relationship between the real exchange rate and monetary shocks. With reasonable parameters values, a wide range of monetary policy rules can generate real exchange rate autocorrelations around the ones observed in the data.     

Stock exchange competition in a simple model of capital market equilibrium

This paper uses a simple model of mean-variance capital markets equilibrium with proportional transactions costs to analyze the competition of stock markets for investors. We assume that equity trading is costly and endogenize transactions costs as variables strategically influenced by stock exchanges. Among other things, the model predicts that increasing financial market correlation leads to a decrease of transaction costs, an increase in cross-border trading activity, and to a decrease in the home bias of international equity flows. These predictions are consistent with the recent evolution of international stock markets.     

Monetary policy in a channel system

Channel systems for conducting monetary policy are becoming increasingly popular. Despite its popularity, the consequences of implementing policy with a channel system are not well understood. We develop a general equilibrium framework of a channel system and study the optimal policy. A novel aspect of the channel system is that a central bank can “tighten” or “loosen” its policy without changing its policy rate. This policy instrument has so far been overlooked by a large body of the literature on the optimal design of interest-rate rules.     

Monetary policy,exchange rates and stock prices in the Middle East region

A structural vector autoregressive model is employed to investigate the impact of monetary policy and real exchange rate shocks on the stock market performance of Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. In order to identify the structural shocks both short run and long run restrictions are applied. Unlike previous literature the contemporaneous interdependence between the financial variables is left unrestricted to give a more accurate depiction of the relationships. The heterogeneity of the results reflects the different monetary policy frameworks and stock market characteristics of these countries. Mainly, monetary policy and the real exchange rate shocks have a significant short run impact on the stock prices of the countries that apply a relatively more independent monetary policy and flexible exchange rates.