The effectiveness of the ECB’s unconventional monetary policy: Comparative evidence from crisis and non-crisis Euro-area countries

During the European financial crisis, the European Central Bank implemented a series of unconventional monetary policy measures. We argue that these programs lowered the bond yield spreads of Euro-area countries. This hypothesis is tested using pooled OLS estimations and two different datasets: monetary policy event dummies and the purchase volumes of the Securities Markets Programme (SMP). Overall, we find significantly negative effects on bond yield spreads for both datasets, leading us to accept the hypothesis. While the OMT reduces the spreads of both crisis and non-crisis countries, LTROs and the lowering of the deposit rate to 0 percent are mainly effective in non-crisis countries. The SMP lowers the spreads of crisis countries, but it has the opposite effect on non-crisis countries. This converse effect is explained by the risk that increasingly accumulates on the ECB’s balance sheet through the SMP and that way constitutes a fiscal risk for non-crisis countries. The results are confirmed by pooled OLS estimations that measure the effect of unconventional monetary policy on central government debt.     

Exchange rate pass-through in emerging countries: Do the inflation environment,monetary policy regime and central bank behavior matter?

In this paper, we estimate the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to import and consumer prices for a sample of 14 emerging countries over the 1994Q1-2015Q3 period. To this end, we augment the traditional bivariate relationship between the nominal effective exchange rate and inflation by accounting for monetary stability proxied by the inflation environment, monetary policy regime and central bank behavior. We show that both the level and volatility of inflation, as well as adopting an inflation target or the transparency of monetary policy decisions clearly reduce ERPT to consumer prices. However, uncertainty about domestic monetary policy seems less relevant in explaining the pass-through to the price of imports.     

The implications of monetary expansion in China for the US dollar

We examine the influence of rapid growth in China's money supply on the US dollar within a framework of monetary models of exchange rates. We develop out-of-sample forecasts of the US dollar exchange rate using US and global data on price level, output, and interest rates, and money supply data for the US, China, and the rest of the world for the period 1996–2013. Monetary model forecasts significantly outperform a random walk forecast in terms of mean squared forecast error in the long run. A monetary error correction model with sticky prices performs best. Rolling sample analysis indicates changes over time in the influence of Chinese money supply in forecasting the US dollar. The expectation is that rapid money growth in China would increase the demand for dollars thus raising the value of the dollar, yet our forecasts are to the contrary for the mid 2000s. This is consistent with anticipation of renminbi appreciation under China’s managed exchange rate, which made holding renminbi more attractive. With the break from a dollar peg in 2005 and subsequent currency appreciation, the distortion was alleviated and the forecast direction for the dollar became as expected.     

Unconventional monetary policy and the stock market’s reaction to Federal Reserve policy actions

We examine the change in the effect of Federal Reserve’s policy actions on stock returns after the Fed started to use unconventional policy actions. We find that the response of stock returns to monetary policy actions are almost seven times higher after the federal funds rate hit the zero lower bound. We conduct additional analysis to examine the underlying causes of the increase in the impact of monetary policy actions of stock returns. We show that investors rebalance their portfolios towards equity after selling Treasury securities to the Federal Reserve during large scale asset purchases.     

Design limits and dynamic policy analysis

This paper characterizes the frequency domain properties of feedback control rules in linear systems in order to better understand how different policies affect outcomes frequency by frequency. We are especially concerned in understanding how reductions of variance at some frequencies induce increases in variance at others. Tradeoffs of this type are known in the control literature as design limits. Design limits are important in understanding the full range of effects of macroeconomic stabilization policies. We extend existing results to account for discrete time bivariate systems with rational expectations. Application is made to the evaluation of monetary policy rules.     

电子货币视角下货币流通速度下降原因的实证分析

选择我国电子货币及货币流通速度相关统计数据和指标,对电子货币与货币流通速度的相关性进行的统计检验表明,电子货币在对传统货币替代时存在两个明显的替代效应:替代加速效应和替代转化效应.两个效应的作用具有明显的阶段性特征,但电子货币对传统货币的取代并没有加快货币流通速度,反而导致了货币流通速度的下降,这与大多数学者的研究结论相反,这为解释近年来我国货币流通速度持续下降的原因提供了一个新的角度.     

The effect of capital requirement regulation on the transmission of monetary policy: evidence from Austria

This paper analyzes the role of banks’ regulatory capitalization in the transmission of monetary policy. We use a confidential dataset for Austrian banks spanning from the first quarter of 1997 to the fourth quarter of 2003. We find evidence that Austrian banks react in an asymmetric way to monetary policy depending on their regulatory excess capitalization, i.e. low capitalized banks react more restrictively to a monetary tightening than their highly capitalized peers.

The Costs of Increasing Transparency

In their seminal paper, Morris and Shin (Amer Econ Rev 92(5): 1521–1534, 2002a) argued that increasing the precision of public information is not always beneficial to social welfare. Svensson (Amer Econ Rev 96: 448–451, 2006) however has disputed this by saying that although feasible, the conditions for which this was true, were not all that likely. In that respect, therefore, increasing ‘transparency’ remains most of the times beneficial to social welfare. In this paper, we extend the Morris and Shin attempt by setting it up as an explicit interactive game between the Central Bank, the objectives of which we model explicitly, and the private sector. We show that in the absence of costs, both players benefit from transparency in the manner described previously in the literature, and point the differences in their gains. Following that, we then introduce the fact that increasing transparency comes at some costs and show how both players face incentives to free ride on each other as a result. The presence of costs thus alters the way in which greater transparency is attained.

Saving–investment Correlations in Response to Monetary Policy Shocks: New Insights into the Feldstein–Horioka Puzzle?

In this paper, it is argued that the observed high positive correlation between national savings and investment which is found in the data can in part be explained by shocks to monetary policy. This hypothesis, which is established by reviewing some empirical findings, is tested in a two-country DSGE-model framework in the tradition of the New Open Economy Macroeconomics. The simulation results obtained support the idea that shocks to monetary policy might contribute to the explanation of the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle.

中国金融结构问题与M2/GDP偏高现象研究

上世纪90年代中期尤其是1997年之后,流动性过剩和资产价格剧烈波动成为中国经济运行中的典型现象,表现为货币供给量的变化和实体经济变量即产出和物价变化的脱节———M2/GDP偏高现象。根据宏观经济学的分析框架,货币总量与名义GDP之比作为衡量流动性过剩的尺度,反映了货币供求状态与实体宏观经济总量之间的关系。当流动性过剩成为持续现象时,说明相对于实体经济形成的总供给,货币市场持续出现超额供给,即货币市场提供的一部分货币资金没有流向实体经济,或投入到实体经济的货币资金没有形成真实的商品供给。由于现代货币制度下,货币供给量与金融体系提供的信贷规模和信贷资金流向紧密联系。因此考察流动性过剩现象应该更多关注金融结构,进而金融资源的配置方式和效率的变化。本文结合金融结构发展情况分析中国M2/GDP偏高现象,揭示金融结构发展中的问题并提出相应对策。