Changes In Monetary Conditions Research Articles

Empirical evaluation of monetary policy transmission to stock markets and further transfer of macroeconomic shocks to the real sector

The study focuses on revealing key monetary policy instruments that can influence stock market development and elaborating whether shocks from financial markets and other macroeconomic conditions are further transferred to the real sector, as expected under the monetary transmission mechanism. This paper is an extension of our previous theoretical and empirical research expanding to ten developed and eight developing economies for the period of 1999-2020 using panel data and vector autoregressive models, impulse response functions, and scenario analysis. Firstly, it was examined that actions of monetary policymakers were efficient for stimulating the development of stock markets mostly for developed countries, whereas stock indices in most developing countries seemed not to be sensitive to changes in monetary conditions. Using scenario analysis and impulse response functions, it was discovered that in developing countries, including Poland and Ukraine, an expansionary policy focused on increasing money supply would mitigate deceleration and facilitate the growth of stock indices in the next four quarters, whereas, in developed countries, including the USA, a decline in interest rates under expansionary regime would stimulate the development of stock markets. Finally, the evolution of financial markets together with macroeconomic, social, and political conditions was concluded to be a statistically important factor of economic growth, as initially expected.

Duration of Global Financial Cycles

The duration of Global Financial Cycles (GFCs) have a role in the global financial environment which is shaped by the fluctuations in short-term capital flows, changes in monetary conditions in the center economies and co-movement in asset prices. The duration of GFCs for a set of global financial data – the VIX index, the TED spread and the 3-Month LIBOR-Effective Federal Funds Rate – are analyzed by using a periodogram-based method. Our results suggest that there is a 43-month common cycle for these three series. We obtain eight different cycle periods for 43-month common cycles from our sample period.

The impact of inequality on the transmission of monetary policy

We consider a model to detect the relation between household debt and the transmission of monetary policy in an EU Member State with independent monetary policy and high income inequality (Romania). We find that households response to changes in monetary conditions depends on their income and indebtedness profile. The transmission of monetary policy is more effective for middle income households, which are more indebted and have adjustable rates, as lower policy rates ease the consumption constraints on these households. Low income households respond mainly to budgetary policies, as the increase in disposable income matters most for the bottom quintile. Top income quintile reacts more to monetary policy than bottom quintile, but less than middle income quintiles. Lower inequality is associated with stronger effectiveness and higher homogeneity of monetary policy transmission; in turn, higher inequality is associated with less effectiveness and higher heterogeneity of the impact of the monetary policy.

International Transmission of Japanese Monetary Shocks Under Low and Negative Interest Rates: A Global Favar Approach

We examine the implications of Japanese monetary shocks under recent very low and sometimes negative interest rates to the Japanese economy as well as three of its major trading partners: Korea, China and the United States. We follow the literature in using movements in 2-year Japanese government bond rates as proxies for changes in monetary conditions in the neighborhood of the zero lower bound. We examine the implications of shocks to the 2-year rate in a series of factor-augmented vector autoregressive - or FAVAR - models, in which both local and global conditions are proxied by latent factors generated from domestic economic indicators and weighted indicators of major trading partners, respectively. Our results suggest that shocks to 2-year Japanese rates do have substantive impacts on Japanese economic activity and inflation in conditions of low or even negative short-term rates. However, we find only modest global spillovers from Japanese monetary policy shocks, as their impact on the economic conditions of major Japanese trading partners is muted, particularly relative to the impact of innovations in 2-year U.S. Treasury yields over the same period.

Endogenous price flexibility and optimal monetary policy

Much of the literature on optimal monetary policy uses models in which the degree of nominal price flexibility is exogenous. There are, however, good reasons to suppose that the degree of price flexibility adjusts endogenously to changes in monetary conditions. This paper extends the standard New Keynesian model to incorporate an endogenous degree of price flexibility. The model shows that endogenising the degree of price flexibility tends to shift optimal monetary policy towards complete inflation stabilisation, even when shocks take the form of cost-push disturbances. This contrasts with the standard result obtained in models with exogenous price flexibility, which show that optimal monetary policy should allow some degree of inflation volatility in order to stabilise the welfare-relevant output gap.

MONETARY POLICY INDICATORS AS PREDICTORS OF STOCK RETURNS

AbstractWe explore the linkage between stock return predictability and the monetary sector by examining alternative proxies for monetary policy. Using two complementary methods, we document that failure to condition on the Fed's broad policy stance causes a substantial understatement in the ability of monetary policy measures to predict returns. Industry analyses suggest that cross‐industry return differences are also linked to changes in monetary conditions, as monetary policy has the strongest (weakest) relation with returns for cyclical (defensive) industries. Overall, we find that monetary conditions have a prominent and systematic relation with future stock returns, even in the presence of business conditions.

Is Fed Policy Still Relevant for Investors?

Thirty-eight years of U.S. data indicate that U.S. monetary policy continues to have a strong relationship with security returns. U.S. stock returns are consistently higher and less volatile when the Federal Reserve is following an expansive monetary policy. Furthermore, the monetary policy–related return patterns of companies considered to be most sensitive to changes in monetary conditions are much more pronounced than average patterns. Finally, the influence of U.S. monetary policy is global; international indexes have return patterns similar to those for the U.S. market. Overall, the evidence suggests that investment professionals should continue to consider monetary conditions when performing fundamental analysis of U.S. and international securities.

THE BALANCE OF PAYMENTS AND POLICY MIX: SIMULATIONS BASED ON A U.S. MODEL

The model itself includes 53 stochastic equations and a dozen identities. The stochastic relationships were obtained with quarterly data spanning 1952-1969,2 using simple single-equation least-squares estimation. Specification was governed by three objectives: (1) to feature explicitly the principal instruments of fiscal and monetary policies-government expenditure, tax rates, and bank reserves; (2) to trace the important connections between domestic economic activity and the balance of payments, and to feed effects of changes in the balance of payments back into the domestic economy,3 (3) to facilitate simple, sequential programming. The foreign sector of the model is fairly large. It seeks to forecast separately each major component of the U.S. balance of payments.4 Furthermore, it offers and tests a number of hypotheses that have not found their way into other models. I argue, for example, that short-term variations in U.S. direct investment depend in chief on changes in monetary conditions affecting the locus and method of financing capital formation abroad, not on changes in the conditions affecting the long-term decision to undertake foreign investment. Finally, the model exploits my own earlier work on the determinants of short-term capital flows in the U.S. balance of payments.