Monetary Shocks Research Articles

Oceans Apart? China And Other Systemically Important Economies

For at least a decade, in policy circles, China has been considered a systemically important economy. As policy makers worldwide grapple with sluggish growth there is relatively little evidence about the extent to which the G4, which consists of the US, the Eurozone, Japan, and China, as a block contributes to global economic performance in a fashion that is not observed when China is omitted or treated as exogenous perhaps because of its status as an emerging market economy. We estimate a series of panel factor VARs because these seem best suited to exploit cross-border links and determine the relative impact of domestic and global factors. Most importantly, we conclude that domestic and global shocks can reinforce each other. We also conclude it is essential to treat China on a level playing field with the US, the Eurozone and Japan if we are to better understand how shocks among these economies interact with each other. In addition, domestic monetary shocks have no global real effects. However, these same shocks lead to a modest global loosening of monetary policy and financial conditions. Global monetary shocks explain up to 60% of variation in commodity demand and real economic conditions. We conclude that there is scope for net benefits from greater policy cooperation.

Buried in the Vaults of Central Banks: Monetary Gold Hoarding and the Slide into the Great Depression

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by formal macroeconometric work. In deliberate contrast to the existing macroeconometric literature, the paper i) uses a newly-assembled monthly data set of the interwar world economy, and ii) models monetary disturbances as shocks to central bank gold demand. Based on a monetary DSGE model, the world gold reserve ratio (the ratio of central bank gold holdings to monetary liabilities) is used to describe monetary conditions. This permits the use of narrative information to sharpen shock identification in a structural VAR analysis based on sign restrictions. Monetary shocks are found to have real effects and to account for a substantial part of the collapse in prices and output during the initial slide into the Great Depression.

When is Bad News Good News? U.S. Monetary Policy, Macroeconomic News, and Financial Conditions in Emerging Markets

Rises in U.S. interest rates are often thought to generate adverse spillovers to emerging market economies (EMEs). We show that what appears to be bad news for EMEs might actually be good news, or at least not-so-bad news, depending on the source of the rise in U.S. interest rates. We present evidence that higher U.S. interest rates stemming from stronger U.S. growth generate only modest spillovers, while those stemming from a more hawkish Fed policy stance or inflationary pressures can lead to significant tightening of EME financial conditions. Our identification of the sources of U.S. rate changes is based on high-frequency moves in U.S. Treasury yields and stock prices around FOMC announcements and U.S. employment report releases. We interpret positive comovements of stocks and interest rates around these events as growth shocks and negative comovements as monetary shocks, and estimate the effect of these shocks on emerging market asset prices. For economies with greater macroeconomic vulnerabilities, the difference between the impact of monetary and growth shocks is magnified. In fact, for EMEs with very low levels of vulnerability, a growth-driven rise in U.S. interest rates may even ease financial conditions in some markets.

The Macroeconomics of Sticky Prices with Generalized Hazard Functions

We give a thorough analytic characterization of a large class of sticky-price models where the firm’s price setting behavior is described by a generalized hazard function. Such a function provides a tractable description of the firm’s price setting behavior and allows for a vast variety of empirical hazards to be fitted. This setup is microfounded by random menu costs as in Caballero and Engel (1993) or, alternatively, by information frictions as in Woodford (2009). We establish two main results. First, we show how to identify all the primitives of the model, including the distribution of the fundamental adjustment costs and the implied generalized hazard function, using the distribution of price changes or the distribution of spell durations. Second, we derive a sufficient statistic for the aggregate effect of a monetary shock: given an arbitrary generalized hazard function, the cumulative impulse response to a once-and-for-all monetary shock is given by the ratio of the kurtosis of the steady-state distribution of price changes over the frequency of price adjustment times six. We prove that Calvo’s model yields the upper bound and Golosov and Lucas’ model the lower bound on this measure within the class of random menu cost models. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Cyclical Drivers of Euro Area Consumption: What Can We Learn from Durable Goods?

We study the cyclical dynamics of consumption in the euro area (EA) and the large EA countries by distinguishing durable from nondurable expenditures. We adopt a theoretical partial equilibrium framework to justify the identification strategy of our empirical model, a time-varying parameter structural vector autoregression (TVP-SVAR). Following the main insight from the theoretical model, that liquidity constraints induce important interactions between durables and nondurables, we distinguish durable-specific demand and supply shocks, while taking into account monetary and credit conditions. Our main findings are: (i) durables react faster and more strongly than nondurables after monetary shocks in the euro area and in the largest EA countries, a confirmation of an outcome commonly reported for the US; (ii) there is a large degree of cross-country heterogeneity in how different factors (including durable-specific ones) explain consumption; (iii) the strength of spillovers from durable to nondurable consumption, as predicted by theory, is empirically correlated with how much households across countries are likely to be liquidity constrained. JEL Classification: C11, C32, D11, E21, E32

Inflation Targeting and World Monetary Shocks: Evidence from Developing Economies

The paper assesses the co-movement of local and foreign interest rate for developing countries with a full-fledged inflation targeting framework during and after the 2008 financial crisis. A panel linear optimizing monetary model is estimated by the fixed effects with spatial correlation standard errors over quarterly span from Q12007 to Q2 2019. The results suggest that inflation targeters are highly vulnerable to external monetary shocks, even after years of notable efforts to de-dollarization and complete shift towards a full-fledged inflation targeting. From a regime evaluation prospective, the inflation targeters’ response to world monetary shocks is compared to that of a group of fixed exchange rate rule economies and managed exchange rate countries with other monetary regimes. The findings provide evidence that inflation targeting countries are not different in their interest rate response to world monetary shocks compared to non-inflation targeting countries’, and instead of having more flexibility, inflation targeters show stronger reaction to world monetary shocks. These results are found robust when generated out from different subsamples and under assumptions of strict and flexible inflation targeting and policy inertia. The findings indicate that adopting inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policy does not by itself support the overall macroperformance and independence of monetary policy or force continuing commitment to the inflation targeting conditions.

Financial Heterogeneity and the Investment Channel of Monetary Policy

We study the role of financial frictions and firm heterogeneity in determining the investment channel of monetary policy. Empirically, we find that firms with low default risk—those with low debt burdens and high “distance to default”— are the most responsive to monetary shocks. We interpret these findings using a heterogeneous firm New Keynesian model with default risk. In our model, low‐risk firms are more responsive to monetary shocks because they face a flatter marginal cost curve for financing investment. The aggregate effect of monetary policy may therefore depend on the distribution of default risk, which varies over time.

Shadow of the Colossus: Euro Area Spillovers and Monetary Policy in Central and Eastern Europe

Closer integration between Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the EU has opened up channels facilitating the propagation of economic shocks from the core to the eastern periphery. This paper examines the effects of such shocks to economic activity and monetary conditions originating in the Euro Area (EA) on output, prices, money, and interest rates in 10 CEE countries over the period 2005-2018 using a bilateral restricted VAR framework. In contrast to previous studies, we use Divisia monetary aggregates and compare the effects of EA spillovers to domestic shocks. The results indicate that EA shocks explain the majority of variation across all macroeconomic indicators, with money supply shocks playing the most prominent role. Despite some heterogeneity, the impulse response of monetary aggregates to domestic and EA monetary shocks is almost identical across countries. The impact of the EA shock increases over time and persists, while the domestic shock dies out relatively quickly. Accordingly, we find no meaningful monetary independence in the majority of CEE countries. This is likely to prove detrimental to the effectiveness of monetary policies in CEE.

Strategic Inattention, Inflation Dynamics, and the Non-Neutrality of Money

How does competition affect information acquisition of firms and thus the response of inflation and output to monetary policy shocks? This paper addresses these questions in a new dynamic general equilibrium model with both dynamic rational inattention and oligopolistic competition. In the model, rationally inattentive firms acquire information about the endogenous beliefs of their competitors. Moreover, firms with fewer competitors endogenously choose to acquire less information about aggregate shocks – a novel prediction of the model that is supported by empirical evidence from survey data. A quantitative exercise disciplined by firm-level survey data shows that firms' strategic inattention to aggregate shocks associated with oligopolistic competition increases monetary non-neutrality by up to 77% and amplifies the half-life of output response to monetary shocks by up to 30%. Furthermore, the model matches the relationship between the number of firms' competitors and their uncertainty about inflation as a non-targeted moment.

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«Кредитный взгляд» на монетарную политику в России

In this paper, I assess the effectiveness of credit channels of monetary transmission in Russia. I use a dynamic factor model with monetary policy shocks identified using sign restrictions approach. The analysis confirmed the effectiveness of the bank lending channel for consumer loans and short- and medium-term corporate loans. A significant effect of monetary impulses on bank capital was found. At the same time, borrowers’ balance sheet channel is not amplifying, but, on the contrary, restraining the effect of monetary shocks on the economy

Spillover Effects of Global Monetary Shocks on Foreign Banks: Evidence From an Emerging Economy

Spillover Effects of Global Monetary Shocks on Foreign Banks: Evidence From an Emerging Economy

Which Monetary Shocks Matter in Small Open Economies? Evidence from Canada

Which Monetary Shocks Matter in Small Open Economies? Evidence from Canada

One Money, Many Markets: Monetary Transmission and Housing Financing in the Euro Area

We study the transmission of monetary shocks across euro-area countries using a dynamic factor model and high-frequency identification. We develop a methodology to assess the degree of heterogeneity, which we find to be low in financial variables and output, but significant in consumption, consumer prices, and variables related to local housing and labor markets. Building a small open economy model featuring a housing sector and calibrating it to Spain, we show that varying the share of adjustable-rate mortgages and loan-to-value ratios explains up to one-third of the cross-country heterogeneity in the responses of output and private consumption.

The Role of Households’ Borrowing Constraints in the Transmission of Monetary Policy

This paper investigates how the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy depends on the distribution of household debt. Using an original loan-level dataset covering the universe of UK mortgages, we assess the effect of monetary shocks on aggregate consumption by exploiting time variation in a measure of the proportion of households close to their borrowing constraint. We find that monetary policy is most potent when there is a large share of constrained households. In contrast, we find no evidence that the average level of borrowing relative-to-income of the household sector affects the transmission of monetary policy.

Dynamic effects of macroeconomic policies on categories of emerging markets’ capital inflows

ABSTRACTUsing panel and country-specific structural vector autoregressions, this paper analyzes the dynamic and size effects of the US monetary policy shock as well as domestic monetary and exchange rate shocks on gross foreign direct and portfolio investment inflows to emerging markets. While the effects of macroeconomic policy shocks are heterogeneous across countries, foreign direct investment inflow’s response to macroeconomic policy shocks is weak in contrast to the strong and on impact response of foreign portfolio investment. Structural vector autoregressions provide richer dynamic structure and a clearer comparison of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors in financial flows via forecast error variance decomposition. This paper does not find evidence for ‘push’ factors’ dominance in either capital inflow type or across the countries.

State-owned Sector and the Effectiveness of Monetary Policy in China

ABSTRACT Based on a standard two-sector New Keynesian sticky price model, we show that the response of sectoral output share to a monetary policy shock can be used to assess the relative price stickiness between the state-owned and private sectors in China. Specifically, the output share of the sector with more price stickiness increases to a positive monetary shock. A structural VAR analysis on the Chinese industrial data confirms that the price is stickier in the state-owned sector. This result implies that the real effect of monetary policy at the aggregate level in China would diminish along with the potential decline of the state-owned sector.

THE CONDITIONAL INS AND OUTS OF FRENCH UNEMPLOYMENT

In this paper, I investigate the conditional contributions of the ins and outs of unemployment from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Based on a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) theoretical framework, I estimate a sign restriction Vector Auto Regressive (VAR) model using French data. To identify the origins of unemployment dynamics in terms of worker transition rates, I simulate two shocks: one on the supply side (technology) and the other on the demand side (monetary). The VAR model reveals that the contributions of transition rates in explaining unemployment differ across shocks. After a technology shock, unemployment fluctuations are mainly explained by the job finding process, while the contributions of the two margins are more balanced for the monetary shock. The theoretical model is not able to reproduce the underlying mechanisms inducing unemployment. In particular, the conditional contributions of the job separation margin are overestimated each time. For instance, after a technology shock, 60% of unemployment changes are generated by this margin, while the data suggest a contribution of 28%. This paper strongly indicates that, in its standard formulation, a search and matching DSGE model featuring endogenous job separations is not able to replicate the dominating influence of the outflow process.

Impact of demonetization 2016 on Venezuelan economy

This article aims to analyze the impact of demonetization 2016 on the Venezuelan economy. The Government of Venezuela demonetized the 100 bolívares notes on December 11, 2016, for achieving economic, monetary and price stability, eliminating the smuggling of banknotes, achieving a higher level of efficiency and quality in government management, and eliminating the laundering of bolívares. In this sense, the origin of the measure is presented and the proposed objectives set are explored. It results that the measure generated shortages of cash, changes in production decisions and commercialization of goods, increase in deposits in the Venezuelan banking system, change in the evolution of monetary aggregates, protests in the offices of banking, and a new distribution of the monetary cone. The originality of this work lies in it being a pioneer in analyzing the impact of demonetizations implemented in Venezuela and Latin America. It is concluded that the demonetization represented a monetary shock that altered the evolution of the economy and required complementary measures to mitigate its effects on the welfare of the population.

Asymmetric effects of unanticipated monetary shocks on stock prices: Emerging market evidence

This study investigates the asymmetric effects of unanticipated monetary shocks on stock prices in India over the period 1994M4–2018M11. We find that the evolution of stock prices is state-dependent across different monetary policy processes. Unanticipated monetary shocks appear to have significantly asymmetrically lagged effects on stock prices, namely: (i) the positive effect of negative unanticipated shocks in bull markets; and (ii) the negative effect of positive unanticipated shocks in bear markets. Our findings imply that monetary policy-markers should attend to these situations for the future of money-supply policies to diminish the degree of uncertainty about the money supply in adjusting stock prices.