Monetary Policy Innovations Research Articles

Winter is Coming: A Tale of Two Futures – Entrepreneurial State or Creative Destruction?

This paper aims to explore the fundamental principles of sound monetary policy, fiscal prudence, and entrepreneurial innovation, which have historically supported the economic prosperity of nations. It seeks to identify the factors leading to an impending financial crisis and proposes countermeasures based on market liberalization and individual entrepreneurial resilience. Using a critical analysis of prevailing economic conditions, this paper evaluates the unchecked expansion of the monetary supply, fiscal policies, and government interventions. The methodology includes a review of historical economic trends and the application of theoretical frameworks concerning monetary policy, fiscal responsibility, and market innovation. The research identifies that the unchecked expansion of the monetary supply has contributed to inflationary pressures, diminished savings incentives, and led to the misallocation of capital. In addition, fiscal looseness and increased government intervention have exacerbated these economic vulnerabilities, creating conditions ripe for an economic crisis of substantial magnitude, possibly surpassing previous crises such as the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper concludes that this impending crisis is not an unforeseeable "black swan" event but rather one with clear warning signs that require immediate action. The findings advocate for a departure from interventionist policies and emphasize the importance of returning to foundational economic principles, including market liberalization and fostering individual creativity and entrepreneurial innovation. This paper serves as a timely call for policymakers to address these challenges before the full impact of the crisis is realized.

Financial Development, Monetary Policy, and the Monetary Transmission Mechanism—An Asymmetric ARDL Analysis

This paper’s objective is to examine the asymmetric cointegration and asymmetric effects of financial development and monetary policy on monetary transmission mechanisms in the Nigerian context using annual data spanning the period from 1986 to 2023. This study pushes the frontiers of knowledge by providing information on the nonlinear impacts of monetary policy and financial sector innovations on monetary transmission mechanisms in Nigeria to help policymakers tailor their strategies to local conditions, enhancing the effectiveness of monetary interventions in the economy. To achieve this, this paper adopted nonlinear ARDL models to understand how changes in the direction of monetary policy and developments in the financial system induce changes in the transmission of monetary policy. The findings document the existence of asymmetries in both the short and long run, revealing that the impacts of financial development and monetary policy on the different monetary policy channels are not uniform. These asymmetries indicate that the responses of various economic variables to monetary policy actions differ depending on the level of financial development. These findings underscore the complexity of the monetary transmission mechanism and the necessity for a nuanced understanding of how financial development and monetary policy interact in different contexts. Consequently, this finding is symptomatic of some characteristics of those financial markets on their way toward advanced developments. As the financial system matures, monetary policy may have a greater impact on the cost of short-term funding for banks without having any discernible effect on the rates at which businesses and households access funding. Therefore, this paper recommends focusing on the policies that will foster the financial system across the banking sector, capital market, bond market, and overall financial sector to improve the efficiency of the monetary transmission process.

Is Time an Illusion? A Bootstrap Likelihood Ratio Test for Shock Transmission Delays in DSGE Models

AbstractSeveral business cycle models exhibit a recursive timing structure, which enforces delayed propagation of exogenous shocks driving short-run dynamics. We propose a bootstrap-based empirical strategy to test for the relevance of timing restrictions and ensuing shock transmission delays in DSGE environments. In the presence of strong identification, we document how likelihood-based tests in bootstrap-resamples can be used to empirically assess short-run restrictions placed by informational structures on a given model’s equilibrium representation, thereby enhancing coherence between theory and measurement. We evaluate the size properties of our procedure in short time series by conducting a number of numerical experiments on a popular New Keynesian model of the monetary transmission mechanism. An empirical application to U.S. data from the Great Moderation period allows us to revisit and qualify previous findings in the field by lending support to the conventional (unrestricted) timing protocol, whereby inflation and output gap do respond on impact to monetary policy innovations.

Infrastructural power, institutional karma, and existential choices

AbstractLeon Wansleben’s new book, The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism, tells an intricately complex story of the world’s most influential central banks successfully harnessing the forces of financial globalization to build their institutional power as the principal managers of their national economies. The book argues that, regardless of central banks’ rationales and rationalizations, the resulting expansion of global money markets has failed to generate the intended macroeconomic and societal benefits. Instead, as became evident in the post-2008 era, the world’s most powerful central banks are now structurally dependent on the increasingly self-referential markets for financial assets. While the book’s narrative is focused on inflation targeting and other monetary policy innovations since the 1970s, it raises much broader questions and invites further reflection on the nonlinear dynamics of power in today’s financial markets and the uncertain future of central banks.

Monetary Policy and Inflation Dynamics in Nigeria: A Bayesian DSGE Approach

This study examines monetary policy shock and inflation dynamics in Nigeria within an open economy Bayesian DSGE model framework, employing data from 2000Q1 to 2023Q1. It applies different price measures across the pre-COVID/Russia-Ukraine war era and the entire sample. Findings reveal a significant impact of monetary policy shock on inflation, irrespective of the price measure adopted. Remarkably, the results also reveal a marginal decline in the potency of monetary policy in the COVID/Russisa-Ukraine War era, compared to the pre- COVID/Russisa-Ukraine War era. The study recommends the adoption of GDP deflator as the measure of inflation that anchors inflation expectations as it is most responsive to monetary policy innovations. It also recommends complementing monetary policy with supply-side policies when faced with inflationary pressures occasioned by supply chain disruptions.

ANALYZING THE BALANCE SHEET OF THE EURO AREA NCBS AND THE ECB. THE IMPACT OF SECURITIES ON INFLATION AND ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

When assessing the decisions of a central bank, such as the European Central Bank (ECB), the traditional focus has been on its interest rate policy and the resulting implications. However, given the increasing use of unconventional monetary policy instruments in recent years, an examination of the Central Bank's balance sheet and its implications has become imperative. This paper investigates the evolution and impact of the Eurosystem's balance sheet on the Eurozone's economy. The empirical analysis utilizes a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) model to analyze the responses to exogenous shocks resulting from innovations in securities held for monetary policy purposes within the Eurosystem. Impulse responses indicate that unconventional monetary policy innovations exert positive impacts on prices and output. These results support the efficacy of unconventional monetary policy and advance knowledge of the links between the balance sheet policies of the European Central Bank and the broader Eurozone economic dynamics.

Monetary policy and exchange rate anomalies in set‐identified SVARs: Revisited

SummarySet‐identified vector autoregressions typically document violations of uncovered interest rate parity (forward discount puzzle) and gradual appreciation–depreciation cycles of exchange rates (delayed overshooting puzzle) following contractionary monetary policy shocks. We revisit both anomalies in a framework similar to Kim et al. (2017, JPE). We complement their identifying restrictions on how monetary policy affects the economy with restrictions on (i) how monetary policy reacts to the economy and (ii) historical monetary policy innovations. In this hybrid identification, no major forward discount premia emerge. Once we additionally impose that monetary policy propagates through domestic financial conditions, exchange rates also overshoot with less delay.

What does anticipated monetary policy do?

Applying sign restrictions to measures of expectations in a VAR, we quantify the economic effects of imperfectly and perfectly anticipated monetary policy innovations—the type of shocks induced by partially and fully credible forward guidance (FG). We find that fully credible FG one-year ahead has large near-term effects on prices and real activity, but, consistent with the forward guidance puzzle, these effects do not grow much larger as the FG horizon extends into the future. We also estimate that anticipated policy innovations are very noisy. At the one-year horizon, over 70 percent of the monetary-policy signal consists of noise, and the prevalence of noise increases at longer horizons. FG subject to this level of noise would be only partially credible and have significantly smaller macroeconomic effects.

What’s Different about Bank Holding Companies?

We develop a dynamic model of a BHC that encompasses both a trading desk and a loan desk, and explore the role of risk attitude and overleveraging by the trading desk. We trace the impact of monetary policy and market innovations on bank behavior in the presence of Basel III type regulations. We show that the value of the BHC is enhanced by operating both desks. We explore alternative regulatory remedies to ongoing efforts to ring-fence the proprietary trading business, and show that regulations that target bank governance can mitigate possible rogue trading and the overleveraging problem.

Identifying monetary policy shocks using economic forecasts in Korea

Understanding monetary policy transmission is crucial to making policy decisions and evaluating macroeconomic models and relevant theories. In this study, we identify monetary policy shocks by orthogonalizing policy rate changes with respect to economic forecast information and examine the responses of a comprehensive set of economic indicators in Korea over 2009–2018 period. We find that monetary policy transmission is effective across almost every sector in the economy, including production, expenditures, prices, interest rates, monetary aggregates, liquidity, and asset prices. In contrast with alternative measures for monetary policy innovation, abnormal responses such as output and price puzzles are not observed using our estimated monetary policy shocks. Private agents’ inflation expectations fall and economic outlook deteriorates after a contractionary monetary policy shock. We attribute these results to the fact that the instant release of economic forecasts along with policy decision announcements weakens the so-called information effect.

Eurozone Stock Market Reaction to Monetary Policy Interventions and Other Covariates

The joint effect of the global economic and sovereign debt crisis forced the European Central Bank (ECB) to apply conventional and non-standard expansionary monetary policy interventions in order to stabilize eurozone economies. We conducted a panel regression econometric analysis to study the influence of euro area monetary authority policy interventions, along with two main macroeconomic variables and a sentiment indicator, on market equity returns of eurozone countries for the period January 2007 to December 2017. Our findings suggest that conventional and non-standard monetary policy innovations had a positive lagged impact on equity returns of euro area monetary markets. More specifically, interest rate cuts evenly influenced market indices while non-conventional actions mainly affected core eurozone countries that were less affected by the crisis. We also document a strong negative relationship between inflation rates and market returns. In addition, the sentiment indicator produces positive effects on returns because it contains information that is not incorporated into other macro variables.

Disentangling Permanent and Transitory Monetary Shocks with a Nonlinear Taylor Rule

Abstract This article provides an estimation method to decompose monetary policy innovations into persistent and transitory components using the nonlinear Taylor rule proposed in Andolfatto, Hendry, and Moran (2008) [Are inflation expectations rational? Journal of Monetary Economics, 55, 406–422]. To use the Kalman filter as the optimal signal extraction technique, we use a convenient reformulation for the state equation by allowing expectations to play a significant role in explaining the future time evolution of monetary shocks. This alternative formulation allows us to perform the maximum likelihood estimation for all the parameters involved in the monetary policy as well as to recover conditional probabilities of regime change. Empirical evidence on the US monetary policy making is provided for the period covering 1986-Q1 to 2021-Q2. We compare our empirical estimates with those obtained based on the particle filter. While both procedures lead to similar quantitative and qualitative findings, our approach has much less computational cost.

Monetary financing and fiscal discipline

Rules governing monetary state financing vary across jurisdictions. The mainstream rationale for bans of state financing rests on the empirical assumption that monetary financing undermines fiscal discipline. We address the plausibility of this assumption by estimating local projection models for a panel of euro area countries to explore the reaction of the sovereigns’ fiscal position to a monetary policy shock. Our results suggest that fiscal discipline is not waning after an expansionary monetary policy innovation that can be related to non-standard policy interventions, as expressed through an improvement of the primary balance despite declining borrowing costs. While no compelling inferences can be made as to the driving force of this improvement – political pressure channeled through conditionality may be a plausible explanation – our results suggest that empirical claims on the adverse effect of unconventional monetary policy on fiscal discipline are ill-founded.

Economic policy and confidence of economic agents – a causal relationship?

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to study whether innovations in monetary and fiscal policy are a leading indicator of future business and consumer confidence and reverse applying the panel Granger causality analysis to two periods in the history of the euro area: before and after the start of the Great Recession. The results show that Granger causality interaction between the confidence of economic agents and the stance of monetary policy (measured by the shadow rate) is stronger than between the former and the fiscal policy instruments. The European Central Bank (ECB) shadow rate innovations Granger caused business and consumer confidence in both periods, but also indicators of confidence Granger caused the shadow rate. No such feedback could be established between two fiscal policy instruments (government expenditure and revenue growth) and the indicators of confidence. Government spending and revenues Granger caused business confidence in the first subperiod, but not in the second subperiod when the causality reversed. The government revenues Granger caused consumer confidence in the first subperiod, while government expenditures in the second subperiod. Consumer confidence Granger caused government spending in the first subperiod.

Monetary policy shock and industrial production: industry-level evidence from the US

PurposeThis paper investigates the impact of a monetary policy shock on the production of a sample of 312 industries in manufacturing, mining and utilities in the United States using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a FAVAR model that builds on Bernanke et al. (2005) and Boivin et al. (2009). The main assumption in this model is that the dynamics of a large set of macro variables are captured by some observed and unobserved common factors. The unobserved factors are extracted from a large set of macroeconomic data. The key advantage of using this model is that it allows extracting the impulse responses of a wide range of macroeconomic variables to structural shocks in the federal funds rate.FindingsThe results indicate that industries exhibit differential responses to an unanticipated monetary policy tightening. In general, manufacturing industries appear to be more sensitive compared to mining, and utility industries and durable manufacturing industries are found to be more sensitive than those within nondurable and other manufacturing industries to a monetary policy shock. While all industries respond to the policy shock, most of the responses are reversed between 12 and 22 months.Research limitations/implicationsThe implication of our results is that monetary policy can be used to impact most US industries for four years and beyond. The existence of disparate responses across industries underscores the difficulty of implementing a monetary policy that will generate the same impact across industries. As the effects of the policy are distinct, policymakers may want to attend to the unique impacts and implement industry-specific policy.Practical implicationsThe study is important in the context of the current challenges in the US economy caused by the spread of coronavirus. For example, to tackle the current pandemic, the researchers are trying to come up with cures for COVID-19. A considerable response of the chemical industry that provides materials to pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing to the monetary policy shock implies that an expansionary monetary policy may facilitate an invention and adequate supply of the cure later on. The same policy may not effectively stimulate production in apparel or leather product industries that are being hard hit by the pandemic.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature in broadly two aspects. First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the impact of a monetary policy shock on a sample of 312 industries in manufacturing, mining and utilities in the US. Second, to identify structural shocks and investigate the effects of monetary policy shocks on economic activity, the authors diverge from the literature's traditional approach, i.e. the vector autoregression (VAR) method and use a FAVAR method. The FAVAR provides a comprehensive description of the impact of a monetary policy innovation on different industries.

The effects of the monetary policy on the U.S. housing boom from 2001 to 2006

This paper presents a DSGE model to test the relative significance of monetary policy and financial market innovations in creating the U.S. housing boom between 2001 and 2006. The model generates a trajectory of house price that mimics the Case–Shiller index well when actual Federal Fund rates are taken as inputs. It fails to do so when the monetary policy follows the Taylor rule even if MBS are introduced. We identify several transmission mechanisms of monetary policy with an emphasis on the financial accelerator. The model predicts that banks’ lending standards will go down with the benchmark interest rate.

The Role of Financial Corporations' Leverage in Transmitting Unconventional Monetary Policy Impulses to the Real Housing Prices

This paper examines the impacts of unconventional monetary policies on real housing prices given the debt-to-equity ratio of financial corporations. We employ VAR and SVAR models with six variables and eleven countries observed from 2000Q1 to 2018Q4. We cluster our sample of 11 countries into two sub-samples depending on the debt-to-equity ratio of financial corporations in each country against the panel average as a benchmark. Our results suggest that: (i) monetary policy transmissions are limited when the financial sector is highly indebted, (ii) mortgage rates can transmit unconventional monetary policy innovations and (iii) household debt innovations are translated into responses in real housing prices but are not originated from the unconventional monetary policy impulses.

Monetary Financing and Fiscal Discipline

Rules governing monetary state financing vary across jurisdictions. The mainstream rationale for bans of state financing rests on the empirical assumption that monetary financing undermines fiscal discipline. We address the plausibility of this assumption by estimating panel vector auto-regressive (VAR) models for euro area Mediterranean crisis countries over the period 2010-2018 to explore the reaction of the sovereigns’ fiscal position to a monetary policy shock. Our results suggest that fiscal discipline is not waning after an expansionary monetary policy innovation related to unconventional measures, as expressed through an improvement of the primary balance despite declining borrowing costs. While no compelling inferences can be made as to the driving force of this improvement – political pressure channeled through conditionality may be a plausible explanation – our results suggest that we can dismiss empirical claims on the adverse effect of unconventional monetary policy on fiscal discipline.

The dynamic effects of monetary policy innovations in Ethiopia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of unanticipated monetary policy innovations on output and price for Ethiopia from 1991:Q1 to 2016:Q1.Design/methodology/approachShort run and long run identification schemes on structural vector autoregressive model are employed in this study.FindingsThe impulse response function results generated show that while a positive shock in interest rate causes a reduction in output and price puzzle, a positive shock to broad money supply has a positive and significant effect on output and price. A positive shock in real effective exchange rate has also an expansionary, though insignificant, effect on impact on both output and price. These results are especially true for the short run identification scheme. As to the results from the variance decomposition, the study shows that the highest variation in output and price is caused by broad money supply shock in the short run.Originality/valueIt adds to the scarce empirical literature on the effects of monetary policy innovations on the Ethiopian economy.

Empirical investigation of changes in policy uncertainty on stock returns—Evidence from China’s market

This study finds evidence that a rise in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) leads to a decline in stock returns in Chinese market; however, a positive coefficient was observed in the lagged EPU as stock prices rebound. This phenomenon also holds true for a rise in uncertainty innovations in fiscal policy, monetary policy, trade policy and global policy. The evidence leads to conclude that policy uncertainty premiums should be priced into China’s stock prices. An escalation of U.S. policy uncertainty has a significantly harmful effect on Chinese stocks regardless of whether firms are stated own or listed on U.S. market.