Determinacy and Learnability of Monetary Policy Rules in Small Open Economies

This paper evaluates under which conditions different Taylor-type rules lead to determinacy and expectational stability (E-stability) of rational expectations equilibrium in a simple "New Keynesian" small open economy model, developed by Gali and Monacelli (2005) . In particular, we extend Bullard and Mitra (2002) results of determinacy and E-stability in a closed economy to this small open economy framework. Our results highlight an important link between the Taylor principle and both determinacy and learnability of equilibrium in small open economies. More importantly, the degree of openness coupled with the nature of the policy rule adopted by the monetary authorities might change this link in important ways. A key finding is that, contrary to Bullard and Mitra, expectations-based rules that involve the consumer price inflation and/or the nominal exchange rate limit the region of E-stability and the Taylor Principle does not guarantee E-stability. We also show that some forms of managed exchange rate rules can help to alleviate problems of both indeterminacy and expectational instability, yet these rules might not be desirable since they can promote greater volatility in the economy.     

Monetary and Fiscal Policy Switching

A growing body of evidence finds that policy reaction functions vary substantially over different periods in the United States. This paper explores how moving to an environment in which monetary and fiscal regimes evolve according to a Markov process can change the impacts of policy shocks. In one regime monetary policy follows the Taylor principle and taxes rise strongly with debt; in another regime the Taylor principle fails to hold and taxes are exogenous. An example shows that a unique bounded non-Ricardian equilibrium exists in this environment. A computational model illustrates that because agents' decision rules embed the probability that policies will change in the future, monetary and tax shocks always produce wealth effects. When it is possible that fiscal policy will be unresponsive to debt at times, active monetary policy (like a Taylor rule) in one regime is not sufficient to insulate the economy against tax shocks in that regime and it can have the unintended consequence of amplifying and propagating the aggregate demand effects of tax shocks. The paper also considers the implications of policy switching for two empirical issues.     

Determinacy, Learnability, and Monetary Policy Inertia

We show how monetary policy inertia can help alleviate problems of indeterminacy and non-existence of stationary equilibrium observed for some commonly studied monetary policy rules. We also find that inertia promotes learnability of equilibrium. The context is a simple, forward-looking model of the macroeconomy widely used in the rapidly expanding literature in this area. We conclude that this might be an important reason why central banks in the industrialized economies display considerable inertia when adjusting monetary policy in response to changing economic conditions.     

A Model of Monetary Policy Shocks for Financial Crises and Normal Conditions

Deteriorating economic conditions in late 2008 led the Federal Reserve to lower the target federal funds rate to near zero, inject liquidity through novel facilities, and engage in large‐scale asset purchases. The combination of conventional and unconventional policy measures prevents using the effective federal funds rate to assess the effects of monetary policy beyond 2008. We employ a broad monetary aggregate to elicit the effects of monetary policy shocks both before and after 2008. Our estimates align well with major changes in the Fed's asset purchase programs and yield responses that are free from price, output, and liquidity puzzles that plague other approaches.     

Monetary Policy and Financial Stability: Cross‐Country Evidence

We explain the heterogeneous response of central banks to financial stability risks based on a financial stability orientation (FSO) index, which reflects statutory, regulatory, and discretionary components of central banks' monetary policy frameworks. Our baseline results from a cross‐country panel of modified Taylor rules suggest that central banks with a high FSO increase their policy rates in response to elevated financial stability risks by 0.27 percentage points more than central banks with a low orientation. Back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations suggest that this policy rate differential translates into a reduced crisis probability but also into considerably lower inflation and output growth rates.     

The Dynamic (In)Efficiency of Monetary Policy by Committee

This paper develops a model where the value of the monetary policy instrument is selected by a heterogenous committee engaged in a dynamic voting game. Committee members differ in their institutional power, and in certain states of nature, they also differ in their preferred instrument value. Preference heterogeneity and concern for the future interact to generate decisions that are dynamically inefficient and inertial around the previously agreed instrument value. This model endogenously generates autocorrelation in the policy variable and helps explain the empirical observation that the distribution of actual interest rate changes has a mode of zero.     

Monetary policy and distribution

A segmented markets model of monetary policy is constructed, in which a novel feature is goods market segmentation, and its relationship to conventional asset market segmentation. The implications of the model for the response of prices, interest rates, consumption, labor supply, and output to monetary policy are determined. As well, optimal monetary policy is studied, as are the costs of inflation. The model features persistent nonneutralities of money, relative price effects of increases in the money supply, persistent liquidity effects, and a negative Fisher effect from a money supply increase. A Friedman rule is in general suboptimal.     

Private Sector Influences on Monetary Policy in the United States

I examine the extent to which the Federal Reserve's monetary policy actions are correlated with the expressed wishes of private sector lobbying groups. I update and extend work by Havrilesky (1990, 1993) regarding the effect of signals from the banking industry through the Federal Advisory Council (FAC). I also construct a new database containing statements from non-financial interest groups. I find that monetary policy actions are correlated with signals from non-financial groups before 1979 but not after, and are correlated with signals from the FAC after 1979 but not before. I also find that the Fed's policy stance more closely matches the preferred stance of the banking industry after 1979.     

Monetary Policy and Financial Markets at the Effective Lower Bound

I discuss what determines the effective lower bound (ELB) for the policy rate and argue that the ELB is not hard, but rather soft, and that it is probably slightly negative. I argue that, at the ELB, current output can be increased by (i) monetary policy that extends the period of credibly low policy rates and generates inflation expectations, (ii) financial‐stability policy—which is distinct from monetary policy—that reduces the spreads between market interest rates and the policy rate, and (iii) fiscal policy that increases the neutral real rate by reducing expected growth of government expenditure and increases potential output by increasing current government expenditure.     

U.S. Monetary Regimes and Optimal Monetary Policy in the Euro Area

Monetary policy in the United States has been documented to have switched from reacting weakly to inflation fluctuations during the 1970s, to fighting inflation aggressively from the early 1980s onward. In this paper, I analyze the impact of the U.S. monetary policy regime switches on the Eurozone. I construct a New Keynesian two‐country model where foreign (U.S.) monetary policy switches regimes over time. I estimate the model for the U.S. and the Euro Area using quarterly data and find that the United States has switched between those two regimes, in line with existing evidence. I show that foreign regime switches affect home (Eurozone) inflation and output volatility and their responses to shocks, substantially, as long as the home central bank commits to a time‐invariant interest rate rule reacting to domestic conditions only. Optimal policy in the home country instead requires that the home central bank reacts strongly to domestic producer‐price inflation and to international variables, such as imported goods relative prices. In fact, I show that currency misalignments and relative prices play a crucial role in the transmission of foreign monetary policy regime switches internationally. Interestingly, I show that only marginal gains arise for the Euro Area when the European Central Bank (ECB) adjusts its policy according to the monetary regime in the United States. Thus, a simple time‐invariant monetary policy rule with a strong reaction to Producer Price Index (PPI) inflation and relative prices is enough to counteract the effects of monetary policy switches in the United States.     

Macro Credit Policy and the Financial Accelerator

This paper studies macro credit policies within the financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999). The focus is on borrower‐based restrictions on lending such as loan‐to‐value (LTV) ratios. We find that the efficacy of cyclical taxes on LTV ratios depends upon the nature of the underlying loan contract. If the loan contract contains equity‐like features such as indexation to aggregate conditions, then there is little role for cyclical taxation. But if the loan contract is not indexed to aggregate conditions, then there are substantial gains to procyclical taxes on LTV ratios.     

Globalization, Macroeconomic Performance, and Monetary Policy

The paper argues that many of the exaggerated claims that globalization has been an important factor in lowering inflation in recent years just do not hold up. Globalization does, however, have the potential to be stabilizing for individual economies and has been a key factor in promoting economic growth. The paper then examines four questions about the impact of globalization on the monetary transmission mechanism and arrives at the following answers: (i) Has globalization led to a decline in the sensitivity of inflation to domestic output gaps and thus to domestic monetary policy? No. (ii) Are foreign output gaps playing a more prominent role in the domestic inflation process, so that domestic monetary policy has more difficulty stabilizing inflation? No. (iii) Can domestic monetary policy still control domestic interest rates and so stabilize both inflation and output? Yes. (iv) Are there other ways, besides possible influences on inflation and interest rates, in which globalization may have affected the transmission mechanism of monetary policy? Yes.     

U.S. Monetary Policy and International Bond Markets

This paper analyzes how U.S. monetary policy affects the pricing of dollar‐denominated sovereign debt. We document that yields on dollar‐denominated sovereign bonds are highly responsive to U.S. monetary policy surprises—during both the conventional and unconventional policy regimes—and that the passthrough of unconventional policy to foreign bond yields is, on balance, comparable to that of conventional policy. In addition, a conventional U.S. monetary easing (tightening) leads to a significant narrowing (widening) of credit spreads on sovereign bonds issued by countries with a speculative‐grade credit rating but has no effect on the corresponding weighted average of bilateral exchange rates for a basket of currencies from the same set of risky countries; this indicates that an unanticipated tightening of U.S. monetary policy widens credit spreads on risky sovereign debt directly through the financial channel, as opposed to indirectly through the exchange rate channel. During the unconventional policy regime, yields on both investment‐ and speculative‐grade sovereign bonds move one‐to‐one with policy‐induced fluctuations in yields on comparable U.S. Treasuries. We also examine whether the response of sovereign credit spreads to US monetary policy differs between policy easings and tightenings and find no evidence of such asymmetry.     

Optimal Fiscal Policy Rules in a Monetary Union

This paper investigates the importance of fiscal policy in providing macroeconomic stabilization in a monetary union. We use a microfounded New Keynesian model of a monetary union, which incorporates persistence in inflation and non-Ricardian consumers, and derive optimal simple rules for fiscal authorities. We find that fiscal policy can play an important role in reacting to inflation, output, and the terms of trade, but that not much is lost if national fiscal policy is restricted to react, on the one hand, to national differences in inflation and, on the other hand, to either national differences in output or changes in the terms of trade. However, welfare is reduced if national fiscal policy responds only to output, ignoring inflation.     

Monetary Policy, Determinacy, and Learnability in a Two-Block World Economy

We study how determinacy and learnability of worldwide rational expectations equilibrium may be affected by monetary policy in a simple, two-country, New Keynesian framework under both fixed and flexible exchange rates. We find that open economy considerations may alter conditions for determinacy and learnability relative to closed economy analyses and that new concerns can arise in the analysis of classic topics such as the desirability of exchange rate targeting and monetary policy cooperation.     

Monetary Policy,Trend Inflation,and Unemployment Volatility

The literature has long agreed that the DMP model (after Diamond 1982, Mortensen 1982, Pissarides 1985) with search and matching frictions in the labor market can deliver large volatilities in labor market quantities, consistent with empirical data, only if there is at least some wage stickiness. I show, however, that the model can deliver nontrivial volatilities without wage stickiness, as long as it has price dispersion and nonzero long‐run inflation rates. I find that by keeping inflation at a positive rate, monetary policy may be accountable for the large standard deviations observed on labor market variables. In addition, the Shimer (2005) puzzle disappears under monetary policy shocks.     

Monetary Policy Implementation in a Negative Rate Environment

To analyze monetary policy implementation in a negative rate environment, we add the option to exchange central bank reserves for cash to the standard workhorse model of monetary policy implementation (Poole 1968). Importantly, we show that monetary policy can be constrained when the target overnight rate is below the yield on cash. At this point, the overnight rate equals the yield on cash instead of the target rate. Modifications to the implementation framework, such as a reserve requirement that varies with cash withdrawals, can help restore the implementation of monetary policy such that the overnight rate equals the target rate.     

Learning,Monetary Policy,and Asset Prices

We explore the stability properties of interest rate rules granting an explicit response to stock prices in a New Keynesian DSGE model where the presence of non‐Ricardian households makes stock prices nonredundant for the business cycle. We find that responding to stock prices enlarges the policy space for which the equilibrium is both determinate and E‐stable (learnable). In particular, the Taylor principle ceases to be necessary, and determinacy/E‐stability is granted also by mildly passive policy rules. Our results appear to be more prominent in economies featuring a lower elasticity of substitution across differentiated products and/or more rigid labor markets.     

Monetary Policy Transmission with Interbank Market Fragmentation

This paper shows how interbank market fragmentation disrupts the transmission of monetary policy. Fragmentation is the fact that banks, depending on their country of location, have different probabilities of default on their interbank borrowings. Once fragmentation is introduced into standard theoretical models of monetary policy implementation, excess liquidity arises endogenously. This leads short-term interest rates to depart from the central bank policy rates. Using data on monetary policy operations, I show that this mechanism has been at work in the euro area since 2008. The model is used to analyze conventional and unconventional monetary policy measures.