Inflation Gap Research Articles

The Relation between Monetary and Macroprudential Policy

This paper analyzes the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policies with different levels of cooperation among policy authorities: non-cooperation, full cooperation, and leader-follower relation. In non-cooperation, each policy authority’s optimal response is to tighten its policy measures when the inflation gap, the output gap and the credit gap expand, and when other authorities’ policy measures are loosened. This indicates that the two policies are substitutes for each other. The condition for the response functions to converge to a Nash equilibrium and the speed of convergence depend on the authorities’ preferences and the economic structure. If the financial supervisory authority (FSA) puts greater importance on the output gap, the probability of non-convergence increases and the speed of convergence declines even when the condition of convergence is satisfied. When the policy authorities fully cooperate with each other, they can establish an optimal combination of policy responses to each of the three gaps.

Is There a Role for Independent Monetary Policy in Barbados?

Conventional monetary theory holds that a country can only possess one nominal anchor in the long run. With an open capital account, the country must decide between an exchange rate target or independent monetary policy. The latter implies inflation targeting with a benchmark interest rate reacting to output gap, inflation gap and possibly a macro-prudential variable. This paper addresses this question in the context of Barbados by exploring a novel channel of the transmission mechanism. We argue that shocks to the foreign exchange constraint engender dynamic changes in bank assets, bank liquid assets, aggregate output and price level. Therefore, an examination of the transmission mechanism in small economies requires that the foreign exchange constraint be taken into account. There is tentative evidence that the Treasury bill rate in Barbados could serve as a benchmark reacting to shocks in the foreign exchange market. The Treasury bill rate could help to smooth the flow of foreign exchange through the Barbadian foreign exchange market. Seen in this light, the benchmark rate allows for a dual, but secondary anchor, in support of the primary exchange rate target. Once this interest rate is determined in the primary Treasury bill market, and not in a flexible yield secondary market, the monetary authority can minimize the domestic debt burden associated with the benchmark. Moreover, imperfectly competitive buyers of Treasury bills can purchase in bulk and still make profit at a lower interest rate, thereby reducing the debt burden.

Trend inflation, firms' backward-looking behavior, and inflation gap persistence

In the macroeconomics literature, it is often believed that inflation persistence can be attributed to variations in the Federal Reserve's long-run inflation target rather than to firms' backward-looking pricing behavior. With this in mind, this paper investigates the need for a role of firms' backward-looking behavior in accounting for inflation persistence after trend inflation is eliminated from the inflation rate. Our findings are twofold. First, the observed low contemporaneous correlation and reverse dynamic correlation between the output gap and the inflation gap cannot be replicated by a standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model incorporating the purely forward-looking New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) and trend inflation. When the NKPC is replaced with its hybrid version, the DSGE model does provide a reasonable description of the observed joint dynamic correlation between the output and the inflation gaps. Second, the second moments of key macroeconomic variables are best explained by the hybrid NKPC emphasizing both firms' forward- and their backward-looking behaviors. These results dispute the view that trend inflation is able to replace the role of firms' backward-looking behavior in generating inflation persistence.

An Unobserved Components Phillips Curve in an Emerging Market Economy: The Case of India

This paper reassesses inflation-output dynamics by modelling a Phillips curve for India. Instead of using an Autoregressive Distibuted Lag (ARDL) model, an Unobserved Components (UC) model is used to estimate a Phillips curve in which the lagged inflation term of the ARDL specification is replaced with an unobserved random walk, as in Harvey (2011). This facilitates model building and allows the use of the Kalman (1960) filter to compute output gap. Contrary to the literature which has been confined to the use of more conventional econometric techniques, the results of this paper indicate that a positive relationship between inflation and output gap cannot be ruled out for Indian data, even without explicitly controlling for supply shocks. This is a novel finding and stands in contrast to existing literature which is, at best, skeptical of any such relationship between inflation and output gap in India.

A regime-switching approach to estimating the nonlinear quantity-based monetary policy rule in China

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the quantity-based monetary policy rule in China. The article applies a Markov regime-switching approach to estimate the nonlinear policy rule using quarterly data from 1997Q1 to 2015Q2. Overall, the performance of the estimated two-state rule is significantly better than the performance of the linear rule. The regime-switching estimation suggests that the quantity-based policy tool displays a countercyclical response to the inflation gap but a pro-cyclical response to the output gap during recessions. In addition, this article provides notable evidence of the fact that China’s central bank has been targeting inflation over the gradual course of financial liberalization.

Asymmetric monetary policy rules in Australia

ABSTRACTIn this study, the hypothesis that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) implements an asymmetric monetary policy rule is tested. We estimate both linear and asymmetric monetary policy reaction functions for the period before inflation targeting was adopted, for the period when inflation targeting was explicitly adopted and for the full sample period. The results of the linear monetary policy rules are consistent with the estimates reported from other studies that estimate linear monetary policy rules for Australia. On the other hand, the results of estimating the asymmetric monetary policy rules for the pre-inflation targeting period shows that the RBA had reacted symmetrically, suggesting that it had acted with the same aggressiveness towards both inflation and output gaps of the same magnitude, over both phases of the business cycle. However, for the inflation targeting period, the results show that the RBA had reacted asymmetrically in its policy response to the inflation gap, output gap or both. A similar result is found for the full sample period. This asymmetric response supports the view that a non-linear monetary policy rule emanated from asymmetric preferences, rather than from the existence of a non-linear Phillips curve.

Active and Passive Monetary Policy in CEE Countries with Inflation Targeting: The Case of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland

The concept of nonlinear Taylor rules describing behavior of the central banks becomes popular in the literature. In this paper we estimate Markov switching Taylor rules for three CEE economies: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, all being inflation targeters. For the robustness purposes we estimate several different specifications of the Taylor rule: backward- and forward-looking, with inflation and inflation gap as explaining variables. As the analyzed CEE countries are small open economies additional variables are included to the standard Taylor rule: foreign interest rate and exchange rate. We find that two regimes of monetary policy may be distinguished: passive and active regime. The passive regime, which seems dominant, is characterized by strong smoothing of the interest rate path and little response to inflation and output gap developments. In the active regime the smoothing parameter decreases and the reaction to inflation and/or output gap is stronger.

Estimating Taylor Type Rule for India's Monetary Policy using ARDL Approach to Co-integration

In an open economic environment, economies generally experienced economic instability emerging out of internal and external factors. Like other central banks ’apparently following discretionary policy rule corresponding to fluctuations in the economy, Reserve Bank of India has also been not less than anyone in responding frequently to different economic situations by changing key interest rates those it has under its privilege. Using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model of co-integration, this paper decisively estimates exchange rate augmented Taylor Type rule for India's monetary policy and examined its short-run and long-run behaviour with respect to the output gap, inflation gap and exchange rate over the period from 2001Q1 to 2012Q4. Estimation results revealed that output gap, inflation gap and exchange rate are the important determinants of monetary policy in India. Amongst these three, inflation and output gap found to be matter more for RBI than exchange rate in short-run, but the situation is vice-versa in long-run. The study also asserts that Exchange Rate Augmented Taylor Type rule sufficiently explains the behaviour of RBI's monetary policy.

Robust monetary policy, structural breaks, and nonlinearities in the reaction function of the Central Bank of Brazil

Abstract In this work, we seek to investigate the existence of nonlinearities in the reaction function of the Central Bank of Brazil arising from this policymaker's uncertainties about the effects of the output gap on inflation. Theoretically, we follow Tillmann (2011) to obtain a nonlinear optimal monetary policy rule that is robust to uncertainty about the output-inflation trade-off of the Phillips Curve. In addition, we perform structural break tests to assess possible changes in the conduct of the Brazilian monetary policy during the inflation-targeting regime. The results indicate that: (i) the uncertainties about the slope in the Phillips curve implied nonlinearities in the Central Bank of Brazil's reaction function; (ii) we cannot reject the hypothesis of a structural break in the monetary rule parameters occurring in the third quarter of 2003; (iii) there was an increase in the response of the Selic rate to output gap and a weaker response to the current inflation gap in Meirelles–Tombini's administration; and (iv) the Central Bank of Brazil has also reacted to the exchange rate in Meirelles–Tombini's administration.

Monetary Policy Stress in EMU: What Role for Fundamentals and Missed Forecasts?

ABSTRACTThis article reexamines the problem of monetary policy stress in the EMU. In addition to estimating the amount of stress in particular countries, we investigate its sources by breaking it down into its “fundamental” parts, covering how it is a result of country-specific macroeconomic divergences and the EMU-wide “non-fundamental” component, with special attention given to the role of missed forecasts. Our results confirm that peripheral countries were exposed to risks emerging from low interest rates while the “core” countries did not suffer from much monetary policy stress. Interestingly, the bulk of it was non-fundamental, i.e., not caused by inflation and output gap differentials between countries. We show that missed forecasts did make an important contribution to this part of the stress and were mainly responsible for pushing the interest rate below its rule-consistent level.

Inflation Persistence, Price Indexation and Optimal Simple Interest Rate Rules

We study the properties of the optimal interest rate rule under different sources of inflation persistence. In our model, the optimal policy minimizes price dispersion, which depends on the degree of price indexation. When indexation is zero, inflation persistence depends only on the level of trend inflation, the inflation gap is purely forward‐looking and the optimal policy targets inflation stability. Full indexation makes the inflation gap persistent, eliminates the effects of trend inflation and makes the optimal policy target the real interest rate. We compare our results with empirical estimates of the FED's policy in the post‐WWII era.

Animal Spirits and the Business Cycle: Empirical Evidence from Moment Matching

ABSTRACTIn this article, we empirically examine a hybrid New‐Keynesian model with heterogeneous bounded rational agents who may adopt an optimistic or pessimistic attitude—so called animal spirits—toward future movements of the output and inflation gap. The model is estimated via the simulated method of moments using Euro Area data from 1975Q1 to 2009Q4. In addition, we compare its empirical performance to the standard model with rational expectations. Our empirical results show that the model‐generated auto‐ and cross‐covariances of the output, inflation and nominal interest rate gap can provide a good approximation of the empirical second moments.

Jump-Starting the Euro Area Recovery: Would a Rise in Core Fiscal Spending Help the Periphery?

We show that a fiscal expansion by the core economies of the euro area would have a large and positive impact on periphery GDP assuming that policy rates remain low for a prolonged period. Under our preferred model specification, an expansion of core government spending equal to one percent of euro area GDP would boost periphery GDP around 1 percent in a liquidity trap lasting three years, about half as large as the effect on core GDP. Accordingly, under a standard ad hoc loss function involving output and inflation gaps, increasing core spending would generate substantial welfare improvements, especially in the periphery. The benefits are considerably smaller under a utility-based welfare measure, reflecting in part that higher net exports play a material role in raising periphery GDP.

Is Deflation Good or Bad? Just Mind the Inflation Gap

We explain why the macroeconomic effects of shocks to inflation of the same size, but opposite sign, are not necessarily symmetric. All in all, the costs of deflation and disinflation tend to exceed those of inflation due to the presence of constraints in the economy, namely the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates, downward nominal wage rigidity and borrowing limits. When these constraints are binding, they can prevent monetary policy from closing the inflation gap, labor market from clearing and agents from deleveraging. The impact of a disinflationary shock on the tightness of these constraints depends on the cyclical and structural conditions of the economy. We argue that it would be a mistake to assume that perverse effects can arise only with actual deflation and thus that the classification of deflationary episodes into good (supply-driven) and bad ones (demand-driven) is not only incorrect, but also misleading in terms of policy implications. Empirical evidence for the euro area suggests that the three constraints have become increasingly tight recently.

Coordination of Monetary and Exchange Rate Policy in China: Market Interest Rate Approach

We propose a unique time-varying identification approach to the market interest rate based on Taylor Rule for coordinating the monetary and exchange rate policies. The significant differences exist between real and market interest rates — 2001 and 2009 are high real interest rates, and 2004-2005 and 2010-2012 low real interest rates — that identify monetary and exchange rate policy conflicts in China. These conflicts derive from the indirect effect of monetary factor through interest rate inertia and expected output gap in 2001; the indirect effect of exchange rate factor through interest rates and inflation inertia in 2004-2005; the direct effects of monetary and the exchange rate factors and the indirect effects through interest rate and inflation inertia, and the expected inflation and output gap since 2009. Our empirical results provide decision support for the monetary and exchange rate policy for reforming Chinese market interest rates.

Bernanke versus Taylor: a post mortem

Our analysis sheds light on the issue of whether the monetary policy contributed to the recent housing boom and bust. We have estimated and analysed a model that allows a comparison between the actual policy and several alternative Taylor rules. When the Taylor rule path was computed using revised data and the deflator for the GDP, we found a notable impact on key housing market variables, supporting Taylor’s critique of the Fed policy. However, the bulk of our evidence suggests that the policy as it would have been conducted under our real-time Taylor rules would not have had any significant impact on the housing market variables. This conclusion is robust with regard to the price index used as well as the relative weights used on the inflation and output gaps.

(The Role of Money and Credit Aggregates in Conduct of Monetary Policy in Korea)

Korean Abstract: 글로벌 금융위기를 계기로 그동안 경시되어 왔던 통화·신용량의 중요성이 학계 및 중앙은행을 중심으로 재인식되고 있다. 그러나 양적지표를 실제 금리중심의 인플레이션 타게팅 운용체계에 어떻게 접목시킬 것인가에 관한 연구는 이제 시작단계이다. 이와 관련하여 본고는 한국은행 금융통화위원회의 월별 의사록 내용을 토대로 금통위원들이 통화·신용량을 언급하며 표명한 금리결정 의사 및 강도를 지수화(indexation)하고 동 지수를 이용하여 우리나라가 인플레이션 타게팅 제도를 도입한 이후 통화/신용량을 금리결정에 어떻게 반영해 왔는지를 분석하였다. 분석결과 금융통화위원회는 통화·신용량의 움직임에도 유의하면서 기준금리를 결정한 것으로 나타났는데, 이는 한국은행이 자산가격과 신용경색 등을 고려하여 인플레이션 타게팅 제도를 신축적으로 운용해 왔음을 시사한다. English Abstract: After having been de-emphasized from around the early 1990s, the importance of financial factors such as the money and credit aggregates in the implementation of monetary policy under inflation targeting regimes has gained renewed attention since the recent global financial crisis that erupted in August 2007. Further discussions and rigorous analysis are however needed, to reach a broadly shared consensus among academia and policymakers on the issue of when and how the central bank should incorporate these quantity variables into its actual conduct of interest rate-focused inflation targeting.Our aim in this paper is to address the issue of how the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of Korea took into consideration the actual money and credit aggregates in its policy decisions under inflation targeting over the period 2003-2011. A novelty of our empirical analysis is its construction of an index as a measure for capturing, using the monthly Committee meeting minutes for the period concerned, how many MPC members mentioned their intentions with regard to the policy stance by taking the current movements of money and credit aggregates into consideration just prior to their policy decisions. For the analysis we set up a discrete choice framework for the index. We assign integer values of from 4 through -4, depending upon how many MPC members show their intentions that the policy stance be “tight,” “neutral,” or “easy,” in consideration of the movements of money and credit aggregates for a specific month. The integer value 4 denotes that more than five MPC members mentioned favoring a policy rate hike while the value 2 indicates that it was less than two MPC members. The same classification applies to the negative integer values. A zero value indicates that no MPC member has shown any favoring of a “tight” or “easy” policy stance at all, implying an intended “neutral” stance of the MPC members.We conduct OLS estimation of the effects of the index on the actual policy rate decisions by the Committee members, using an equation controlling for two key macroeconomic indicators such as the inflation gap and the output gap that the Committee considers in setting policy. Interestingly, the estimated index coefficient turns out to be positive and statistically significant. The regression suggests that when the MPC members frequently and strongly mentioned the need to take notice of the movements of money and credit aggregates around the time of the Committee meeting, monetary policy was dominated by concerns over the stabilization of asset prices or massive credit squeezes in the financial markets. We, in addition, estimated two different equations, as a way of checking the robustness of the OLS estimates. The first specification is an ordered probit model in which we estimated the effects of the index on the policy changes in discrete increments. The integer values assigned for the policy changes range from -2 through 2. The values of 2(-2) and 1(-1) correspond to 50 bp and 25 bp hikes (cuts) in the policy rate, respectively, while a value of 0 indicates no policy change. It seems more accurate to use this five-stage classification of policy rate changes as the dependent variable, because the evolution of changes in the policy rate does not follow a smooth process but a step function. In a second experiment, we first estimated the standard Taylor rule over the period concerned, and then the effects of the index on its residual estimates. In both cases, the estimated index coefficients are positive and significant, implying that the results support the OLS estimates mentioned above.To summarize, the evidence suggests that the Bank of Korea has been implementing flexible inflation targeting.

Inflation and Professional Forecast Dynamics: An Evaluation of Stickiness, Persistence, and Volatility

This paper studies the joint dynamics of U.S. inflation and the average inflation predictions of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) on a sample running from 1968Q4 to 2014Q2. The joint data generating process (DGP) of these data consists of the unobserved components (UC) model of Stock and Watson (2007, “Why has US inflation become harder to forecast?,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 39(S1), 3–33) and the sticky information (SI) forecast updating equation of Mankiw and Reis (2002, “Sticky information versus sticky prices: A proposal to replace the New Keynesian Phillips curve,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, 1295–1328). We introduce timevarying inflation gap persistence into the Stock and Watson (SW)-UC model and a timevarying frequency of forecast updating into the SI forecast updating equating. These models combine to produce a nonlinear state space model. This model is estimated using Bayesian tools grounded in the particle filter, which is an implementation of sequential Monte Carlo methods. The estimates reveal the data prefer the joint DGP of time-varying frequency of SI forecast updating and a SW-UC model with time-varying persistence. The joint DGP produces estimates that indicate the inflation spike of 1974 was explained most by gap inflation, but trend inflation dominates the inflation peak of the early 1980s. We also find the stochastic volatility (SV) of trend inflation exhibits negative co-movement with the time-varying frequency of SI forecast updating while the SV and time-varying persistence of gap inflation often show positive co-movement. Thus, the average SPF respondent is most sensitive to the impact of permanent shocks on the conditional mean of inflation.

Optimal Monetary Policy Rules in an Open Economy: Theory and Evidence

The main objective of this paper is to provide a theoretical and empirical framework for monetary policy rule in an open economy. Our model is an optimal but simple forward looking model. Our estimate shows that at least, the trinity of inflation gaps, the structure of the economy and the fiscal policy intervention should be used in each optimal and simple monetary policy reaction function. In this model the gap between domestic inflation and the world inflation make the reaction function appropriate for open economy. Our result especially the value of domestic inflation gap coefficient support the finding of Taylor (1993) and Calarida, Gali and Gertler (2000). Another important finding of this paper is the ability to estimate time-varying long-term interest rate. The fluctuation of the short-term interest rate around the long-term can be used as another important criterion to analyze the conduct of monetary policy.

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