International capital flows,liquidity risk,and monetary policy

In recent years, there has been a large amount of lending coming from the public sector of many developing countries. At the same time, the financial sectors in many advanced countries have issued a large share of portfolio debt to other countries. What are the implications of these events for the global financial system and overall economic activity? Do they have an impact on the transmission channels of monetary policy across countries at different stages of economic development? We investigate these important issues using a micro-founded model of money and banking so that the effects of monetary policy across countries can be meaningfully studied. Notably, the increase in capital outflows to the advanced economy renders monetary policy in developing countries to be less effective, while the effects of monetary policy in advanced economies are more pronounced. Yet, our results indicate that it can indeed be optimal for lower income countries to lend to the advanced world. Importantly, we find that the optimal amount of lending to advanced countries critically depends on the degree of liquidity risk — if it is sufficiently high, then public sector lending to advanced economies is not warranted. Consequently, our results indicate that governments in developing countries should carefully consider how much capital they send abroad to foreign countries.     

Transmission of monetary policy in times of high household debt

This paper explores whether the degree of household indebtedness can affect the effectiveness of monetary policy. We take an interacted panel VAR approach, using a panel of 23 countries, thereby obtaining several interesting findings, such as the responses of consumption and investment to monetary shocks are stronger in high levels of household debt. Furthermore, such responses become larger in a contractionary monetary policy stance rather than in an expansionary one, which suggests that monetary policy shocks have asymmetric effects. We have also found that monetary policy has a relatively larger impact in countries with higher share of adjustable-rate loans. Finally, we have found that when a country is in a high-debt state and in a contractionary policy stance, monetary policy is more powerful in countries with a higher share of adjustable-rate loans. We conjecture that these findings support the presence of a cash-flow channel with respect to the transmission of monetary policy in a high household debt state.     

MONETARY POLICY,FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS,AND REDISTRIBUTION

This article examines how financial constraints affect redistribution via monetary policy. We explore a novel mechanism of monetary nonneutrality, which is based on debt limits imposed in nominal terms. Specifically, when debt is constrained by current income, monetary policy can alter the real terms of borrowing. Changes in inflation exert ambiguous effects, depending on the initial debt/wealth position and the willingness to borrow. We show analytically that borrowers can benefit from increased debt limits under lower inflation rates. This novel effect can dominate conventional debt deflation effects. We find that particularly less indebted borrowers as well as potential future borrowers gain and that aggregate welfare can be enhanced under a permanent reduction in inflation.     

Price and liquidity puzzles of a monetary shock: Evidence from indebted African economies

Price and liquidity puzzles have been identified as two major counterintuitive findings arising from monetary shocks. We investigate their presence in eleven African countries, using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model designed for indebted small open-economies. Our simulations reveal that the majority of African countries report a price puzzle whereas only three countries exhibit liquidity effect. In many of the sampled countries, a positive money growth shock drives interest rates up, but consumption and output fall in contrast to the conventional view. External debt increases in response to money growth shock, exchange rate appreciates and inflation falls. Money growth shocks are transmitted to the economy through the exchange rate channel when uncovered interest rate parity condition holds. Our findings therefore appear to suggest that monetary policy in Africa should prioritize foreign debt stabilization by reacting more to output gap than to inflation.     

Fiscal Rules,Interest Payments on Debt,and the Irrelevance of the Taylor Principle

We show that in New Keynesian models with non‐neutral government debt, the Taylor principle ceases to be relevant for equilibrium determinacy if the government follows a fiscal rule of levying taxes in proportion to its interest payments on existing debt. This is in contrast with previous studies, which typically have assumed that taxes respond to the level of debt, and have found either a confirmation or reversal of the Taylor principle depending on the feedback from debt to taxes. We find, instead, that the equilibrium effect of the interest rate on debt is crucial for determinacy. If, as in our model, taxes are raised in response to debt interest payments, the range of indeterminacy monotonically decreases with the fiscal feedback parameter. When interest payments are completely tax‐financed, indeterminacy is ruled out without any restrictions on monetary policy.     

DEBT NONNEUTRALITY,POLICY INTERACTIONS,AND MACROECONOMIC STABILITY*

We study the consequences of nonneutrality of government debt for macroeconomic stabilization policy in a sticky‐price model. Ricardian equivalence fails because debt has a negative impact on its rate of return and on private savings, which is induced by assuming transaction services of bonds. Under aggressive monetary policy regimes, macroeconomic fluctuations tend to be stabilized if nominal budget deficits are low. A smooth debt path limits inflation expectations, such that inflation variances can be reduced. Under a balanced budget policy, the central bank's output gap–inflation volatility trade‐off is improved relative to an environment where debt is neutral.     

Policy mix and debt sustainability: evidence from fiscal policy rules

This paper characterizes rules-based fiscal policy setting for G-3 and large EMS countries. We set up a simple fiscal policy rule and then infer on the policymakers’ reaction coefficients by testing with GMM. Our results qualify existing evidence on systematic fiscal policy in two respects. First, fiscal policy usually stabilizes public debt; and there is indeed substantial interaction between fiscal and monetary policies via the policy mix or the debt channel. Second, sustainability is achieved with a “stop–go” cycle of consolidation. Unless debt ratios are high, consolidation does not come at the cost of less cyclical stabilization.     

Political instablility and seigniorage: An inseparable couple — or a threesome with debt?

In the literature, political instability is shown to raise seigniorage and/or debt, but there is no debt‐seigniorage trade‐off. However, what happens when the IMF gets involved? Based on a political economy model of intertemporal public finance this paper presents qualitatively new and robust results. First, political instability causes myopic government behaviour and produces more debt, not more seigniorage. Second, IMF policies requiring debtor countries to achieve both monetary and fiscal stability at the same time are ineffective. Third and surprisingly at first sight, debt conditionality aiming at monetary stability is particularly effective in heterogeneous societies with unstable governments.     

Housing market dynamics and macroprudential policies

In this paper, we analyze the implications of macroprudential and monetary policies for credit cycles, housing market stability and spillovers to consumption. We consider a countercyclical loan‐to‐value (LTV) policy that responds to a credit‐to‐income ratio, and we compare its effectiveness with a permanent tightening of the LTV ratio and a monetary policy rule that responds to credit. To this end, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with housing market, household debt and collateral constraints, and we estimate it with Canadian data using Bayesian methods. Our study suggests that a countercyclical LTV ratio is a useful policy to reduce spillovers from the housing market into consumption and to lean against housing market boom–bust cycles. It performs better than the permanent tightening of the LTV ratio—a policy that has been used in a number of countries—and the monetary policy rule, both in terms of the stabilization of household indebtedness and spillovers into consumption. Monetary policy that leans against the wind is the least desirable due to its large adverse consequences on the real economy.     

The effects of public deficits on money growth in the European Union

The impact of government debt on the money supply has been studied for different countries, with an emphasis on developing countries and the U.S. This topic becomes especially interesting in European Union countries that have high public deficits and low inflation rates. It is also very relevant in the monetary union, with a European central bank controlling monetary policy and introducing monetary measures for all the member countries. The main goal of this paper is to analyze if there is any relationship between public deficits and monetary growth in the European Union. The conclusions presented in the previous literature are ambiguous. Some studies concluded that there is little evidence that government debt influences money in some of the member countries.     

A policy model to analyze macroprudential regulations and monetary policy

We construct a small‐open‐economy, new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general‐equilibrium model with real financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. The model incorporates rich interactions between the balance sheets of households, firms and banks, long‐term household and business debt, macroprudential policy instruments and nominal and real rigidities and is calibrated to match dynamics in Canadian macroeconomic and financial data. We study the transmission of monetary policy and financial and real shocks in the model economy and analyze the effectiveness of various policies in simultaneously achieving macroeconomic and financial stability. We find that, in terms of reducing household debt, more targeted tools such as loan‐to‐value regulations are the most effective and least costly, followed by bank capital regulations and monetary policy, respectively.     

Fiscal Austerity and the Multiplier in Times of Crisis

To address concerns about the sustainability of public debt, most industrialized countries shifted towards fiscal austerity after 2010. A popular concern is that austerity is self‐defeating, because fiscal multipliers can be large. Specifically, a number of recent studies find that multipliers tend to be large during financial crises and/or if monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound. However, public debt crises tend to have an offsetting effect by making multipliers smaller than during normal times. Consequently, while austerity is no cure for all, it is unlikely to be literally self‐defeating when sovereign risk is high.     

Monetary policy credibility and exchange rate pass-through: Some evidence from emerging countries

Considering external constraints on monetary policy in emerging countries, we propose a semi-structural vector autoregressive model with exogenous variables (VARX) to examine the exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices. We demonstrate that a lower exchange rate pass-through is associated with a credible monetary policy aiming at controlling inflation. The empirical results suggest that the exchange rate pass-through is higher in Latin American countries than in East Asian countries. The exchange rate pass-through has declined after the adoption of an inflation targeting monetary policy.     

Fiscal rules in a monetary economy: Implications for growth and welfare

This study considers two fiscal rules, a debt rule that controls the debt‐to‐gross domestic product (GDP) ratio, and an expenditure rule that controls the expenditure‐to‐GDP ratio, in a monetary growth model with financial intermediation. Tightening of fiscal rules promotes economic growth and thus, benefits future generations. However, there could be two equilibria of the nominal interest rates, and the welfare effects of the rules on the current generation are different between the two equilibria. In particular, the effects of a decreased debt‐to‐GDP ratio depend on its initial ratio; a high (low)‐ratio country has no incentive (an incentive) to reduce the ratio further from the viewpoint of the current generation's welfare. This result provides an explanation for difficulties with fiscal reform in countries with already high debt‐to‐GDP ratios.     

从内生性货币供给的角度看国债

1 998年以来我国实施了以大量增发国债为核心的积极财政政策 ,虽然对经济的增长起到了一定的促进作用 ,但实施效果并不理想 ,也增加了经济运行中隐藏的危险。本文认为 ,目前我国大量增发国债时并不考虑公债对货币供给的影响 ,而这涉及到公债性质的研究。随着市场经济的发展 ,货币供给越来越明显地表现出内生性 ,因而研究和分析发行国债对内生性货币供给、从而对经济运行的影响是极其重要的。     

Monetary policy and exchange market pressure–evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of monetary policy on foreign exchange market pressure (EMP) in developing country contexts for some selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and to measure the ability of monetary policy to significantly address currency pressures that arise from trading on the global market. This study was motivated by the fact that most of the SSA countries are developing economies that have negative net export positions and stand to lose significantly from consistently deteriorating foreign exchange position. The study, therefore, employs a dynamic panel model to test the hypothesis that a tighter monetary policy stance lends strength to a currency and vice versa, using 20 SSA economies for the period from 1991 to 2010. This study finds a negative and significant relationship between monetary policy and EMP, implying an easing of EMP in the face of contractionary monetary policy. The findings also point to significant relations between aggregate output, levels of public debt, the current account balance, terms of trade and EMP. Findings of this study have important implications as regards the policy direction on exchange rate and currency management.     

Can fiscal rules improve financial market access for developing countries?

A number of countries have introduced fiscal rules to deter fiscal profligacy, enhance the credibility of fiscal policy, and reduce borrowing costs. In this paper, we examine the outcome of fiscal rules in terms of improving financial market access for developing countries. We use entropy balancing and various propensity score matching. We find that the adoption of fiscal rules reduces sovereign bond spreads and increases sovereign debt ratings for a sample of 36 developing countries, which are part of the JP Morgan Emerging Markets Bond Index Global (EMBIG), for the period 1993-2014. We explain this finding by the effect of fiscal rules on the credibility of a country's fiscal policy: more credible governments are rewarded in the international financial markets by low sovereign bond spreads and high sovereign debt ratings. These results are robust to a wide set of alternative specifications. We also show that this favorable effect is sensitive to several country structural characteristics. Our findings confirm that the adoption and sound implementation of fiscal rules is an instrument for policy makers to improve developing countries’ financial market access.     

Liquidity risk, economic development, and the effects of monetary policy

Empirical evidence indicates that monetary policy is not super-neutral in many countries. In particular, in high inflation economies, inflation is negatively related to economic activity. By comparison, inflation may be positively correlated with output in low inflation countries. We present a neoclassical growth model with money in which the incidence of liquidity risk is inversely related to aggregate capital formation. Interestingly, there may be multiple monetary steady-states where the effects of monetary policy vary. In poor economies, the financial system is highly distorted and higher rates of money growth are associated with less capital formation. In contrast, in advanced economies, a Tobin effect is observed. Since inflation exacerbates distortions from a coordination failure in the low-capital steady-state, individuals become much more exposed to liquidity risk. Consequently, optimal monetary policy depends on the level of development.     

Dollarization and financial integration

How does a country's exchange rate regime impact its ability to borrow from abroad? We build a small open economy model in which the government responds to shocks by adjusting monetary policy and foreign borrowing. Sovereign borrowing is subject to endogenous limits, which ensure repayment when the default punishment corresponds to financial autarky. Dollarizing implies renouncing monetary policy, but can make access to international debt markets more valuable, thereby loosening borrowing constraints. This mechanism linking dollarization to financial integration is consistent with observed declines in spreads on foreign-currency debt in countries adopting the dollar or the euro.     

欧债危机对中国的影响及国际货币体系的改革思考

近期,欧债危机愈演愈烈,已显现出向欧元区核心国家蔓延的态势。本文重点分析了欧债危机对中国的影响,在此基础上从短期和长期两个角度提出了中国面对欧债危机的应对之策。同时,作者分析了欧债危机对今后区域与国际货币体系改革的启示,并探讨了中国如何参与当前国际货币体系的改革。