optimal discretionary monetary policy in a model of asymmetric central bank preferences this paper considers optimal monetary policy in the context of the central bank adopting an asymmetric objective function our results show that under asymmetric preferences many of the extant results on the time consistency problem need no longer hold

energy in a regional economy a computable general equilibrium model for california abstract this study presents a model of energy in the california economy and uses it to simulate long run impacts of oil price changes under varying assumptions about the structure of the economy the distinguishing feature of the model is flexibility use of generalized leontief flexible cost functions at the sectoral level captures the substitution effects of relative price changes while at the same time retaining the structure of traditional input output analysis experimental results suggest this innovation can be important a doubling of the price of imported oil leads to a much larger drop in oil use and a substantially smaller drop in aggregate consumption than is obtained with a fixed coefficient version of the model

monetary and macroprudential policies in an estimated model with financial intermediation abstract we estimate the smets wouters model featuring the gertler karadi banking sector on us data using real and financial observables we investigate the gains from coordination between a flexible inflation targeting central bank and a macroprudential regulator charged with safeguarding financial stability the potential gains from coordination depend on how much importance is given to the output gap in the macroprudential mandate coordination conflicts can be avoided by assigning similar importance to this common objective in the respective mandates of both policies when we derive optimal mandates for monetary and macroprudential policy under no coordination we find that both policy makers should place a higher weight than society on the output gap

are monetary policy reaction functions asymmetric the role of nonlinearity in the phillips curve abstract this paper investigates the implications of a nonlinear phillips curve for the derivation of optimal monetary policy rules combined with a quadratic loss function the optimal policy is also nonlinear with the policy maker increasing interest rates by a larger amount when inflation or output are above target than the amount it will reduce them when they are below target specifically the main prediction of our model is that such a source of nonlinearity leads to the inclusion of the interaction between expected inflation and the output gap in an otherwise linear taylor rule we find empirical support for this type of asymmetries in the interest rate setting behaviour of four european central banks but none for the us fed

economic performance of flexible functional forms a correction and comment in a recent article in the european economic review kostas a despotakis 1986 examines the properties of flexible functional forms applying the concept of the inner domain in the numerical experiments he unfortunately uses an incorrect form of the transcendental logarithmic function when the correct functional form is used his experimental results are always weakened and sometimes invalidated in particular the dinerences between the considered flexible functional forms are smaller than his experiments would suggest while the importance of dillerences in the elasticity of substitution is strengthened i introduction

nominal price rigidity money supply endogeneity and business cycles abstract this paper investigates the ability of nominal price rigidity to explain the co movement of inflation with the cyclical component of output observed in the post war u s data a dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed with the introduction of monopolistic competition and nominal price rigidity in a standard real business cycle model allowing for an endogenous money supply rule it is then demonstrated that sticky price models can explain the observed associations between movements in inflation and output much better than flexible price models this result depends little on whether money supply is assumed to be endogenous or not

nairu uncertainty and nonlinear policy rules meyer 1999 has suggested that episodes of heightened uncertainty about the nairu may warrant a nonlinear policy response to changes in the unemployment rate this paper offers a theoretical justification for such a nonlinear policy rule and provides some empirical evidence on the relative performance of linear and nonlinear rules when there is heightened uncertainty about the nairu

does macro prudential regulation leak evidence from a uk policy experiment the regulation of bank capital as a means of smoothing the credit cycle is a central element of forthcoming macro prudential regimes internationally for such regulation to be effective in controlling the aggregate supply of credit it must be the case that i changes in capital requirements affect loan supply by regulated banks and ii unregulated substitute sources of credit are unable to offset changes in credit supply by affected banks this paper examines micro evidence lacking to date on both questions using a unique data set in the uk regulators have imposed time varying bank specific minimum capital requirements since basel i it is found that regulated banks uk owned banks and resident foreign subsidiaries reduce lending in response to tighter capital requirements but unregulated banks resident foreign branches increase lending in response to tighter capital requirements on a relevant reference group of regulated banks this leakage is substantial amounting to about one third of the initial impulse from the regulatory change

shock versus gradualism in models of rational expectations the case of trade liberalization abstract the results of this paper can be interpreted as a new argument for shock rather than gradualism in the implementation of policies in the simple context of a small open economy with rational expectations we consider the comparative welfare effects of the elimination of an import tariff implemented either as an unanticipated shock or gradually over a preannounced length of time the gradualist policy introduces a distortion in consumption accumulation decisions and results in welfare costs that if the gradual change is extended over too long a period may even exceed the long term benefits of liberalization

inflation targeting under asymmetric preferences this paper develops and estimates a game theoretical model of inflation targeting where the central banker s preferences are asymmetric around the targeted rate specifically positive deviations from the target can be weighted more or less severely than negative ones in the central banker s loss function it is shown that some of the previous results derived under the assumption of symmetry are not robust to this generalization of preferences estimates of the central banker s preference parameters for canada sweden and the uk are statistically different from the one implied by the commonly used quadratic loss function

inflation targeting as a monetary policy rule the purpose of the paper is to survey and discuss in ation targeting in the context of monetary policy rules the paper provides a general conceptual discussion of monetary policy rules attempts to clarify the essential characteristics of in ation targeting compares in ation targeting to other monetary policy rules and draws some conclusions for the monetary policy of the european system of central banks jel classi cation e42 e52

capital energy substitution and the multi level ces production function abstract this paper has clarified a misconception in sato s multi level ces production function and used the function in testing for capital energy substitution in taiwanese manufacturing the empirical results show that capital and energy are substitutes and the aes estimates differ little from those derived from the translog approximation

monetary policy bank leverage and financial stability abstract this paper shows that with limited liability banks lever up excessively to finance new loans lower monetary policy rates can worsen or reduce these incentives depending on the size of the shock when equity financing is ruled out when this constrained is relaxed but the bank faces costly dividend adjustment lower monetary policy rates always worsen risk taking incentives and the effect is persistent the reason is that costly dividend adjustment lowers the opportunity cost of lending in this model capital requirements are closer to the source of the distortion and thus work better than loan to value caps in reducing excessive risk taking

inflation forecast targeting implementing and monitoring inflation targets abstract inflation targeting is shown to imply inflation forecast targeting the central bank s inflation forecast becomes an explicit intermediate target inflation forecast targeting simplifies both implementation and monitoring of monetary policy the weight on output stabilization determines how quickly the inflation forecast is adjusted towards the inflation target money growth or exchange rate targeting is generally inferior than inflation targeting and leads to higher inflation variability commitment to target rules may be better than commitment to instrument rules

modelling monetary policy inflation targeting in practice this paper estimates a simple structural model of monetary policy in the uk focusing on the policy of inflation targeting introduced in 1992 we find that i the adoption of inflation targeting led to significant changes in monetary policy ii post 1992 monetary policy is asymmetric as policy makers respond more to upward deviation of inflation away from the target iii post 1992 policy makers may be attempting to keep inflation within the 1 4 2 6 range rather than pursuing a point target of 2 5 and iv the response of monetary policy to inflation is nonlinear as interest rates respond more when inflation is further from the target

production and cost in the us paper and paperboard industry the us paper and paperboard industry has experienced significant structural changes over the past 25 years including reductions in the number of mills lower rates of capacity growth employment cutbacks and a loss of market share to foreign competitors these structural shifts portray an industry that increasingly has difficulty adapting to a more competitive global environment based on aggregate data from 1965 to 1996 this article estimates a short run translog tl cost function for the industry the estimated model fits the data well and all sample points satisfy monotonicity and concavity conditions at all points among the findings the industry operates at slightly increasing returns to capital utilization and labour and energy are allen uzawa complements but morishima substitutes in production technological progress generated 0 02 reduction in annual operating costs and consistent with an ailing us industry estimated marginal costs approximated average operating costs until 1982 after which

on inflation as a regressive consumption tax abstract evidence on the portfolio holdings and transaction patterns of households suggests that the burden of inflation is not evenly distributed we build a monetary growth model consistent with key features of cross sectional household data and use this framework to study the distributional impact of inflation at the aggregate level our model economy behaves similar to standard monetary growth models within the representative agent abstraction inflation has however important distributional effects since it is effectively a regressive consumption tax thus neglecting the distributional consequences of inflation may prove misleading in assessing the effects of inflation in our economy

on the costs of temporary policy abstract the effects and costs of a temporary trade liberalization experiment are studied in terms of a model with an infinitely lived individual under perfect capital mobility and no static gains from trade it is shown that the current account deteriorates during liberalization and becomes more negative the shorter is the liberalization period the costs are non monotonic with respect to the latter and timing of their maximum varies widely with parameters the analysis is extended to include durable and home goods money and static gains from trade

distinguished lecture on economics in government what central bankers could learn from academics and vice versa academic writing about monetary policy has been useful to practical central bankers but more of certain aspects of the economists way of thinking could profitably be imported on the other hand academics could improve their analysis and make it more useful to policymakers if they would pay more attention to certain real world aspects of monetary policy the author draws on his experience at the federal reserve board to point out a number of specific lessons for each side

on the outcome of inconsistent programs under exchange rate and monetary rules abstract this paper studies the case of inconsistent programs of monetary policy that is programs incompatible in the long run with a given budget deficit so that at some point in the future there is an eventual crisis and demise of the program all of which is from the outset anticipated by the public the context is one of a small open economy with perfect foresight in which two sets of possibilities are analyzed i a monetary or an exchange rule for the conduct of monetary policy and ii presence or absence of capital mobility it is found that while the choice of the rule is unimportant restrictions on capital mobility determine a very different response for the case of either rule concerning side effects of the program on non monetary variables and on the post crisis level of country indebtedness

inflation targeting some extensions previous analyses of the implementation of inflation targeting are extended to monetary policy responses to different shocks consequences of model uncertainty and effects of interest rate smoothing and stabilization model uncertainty output stabilization and interest rate stabilization or smoothing all call for a more gradual adjustment of the conditional inflation forecast toward the inflation target the conditional inflation forecast is the natural intermediate target during inflation targeting the optimal way of reacting to shocks is hence to check how they affect the inflation forecast and then take the appropriate action jel classification e42 e52 e58

macroprudential and monetary policies implications for financial stability and welfare in this paper we analyze the implications of macroprudential and monetary policies for business cycles welfare and financial stability we consider a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model with housing and collateral constraints a macroprudential rule for the loan to value ratio ltv which responds to credit growth interacts with a traditional taylor rule for monetary policy we compute the optimal parameters of these rules both when monetary and macroprudential policies act in a coordinated and in a non coordinated way we find that both policies acting together unambiguously improves the stability of the system in both cases this interaction is welfare improving for the society especially in the case of the non coordinated game there is though a trade off between borrowers and savers however borrowers can compensate the saver s welfare loss view the mathml sourcela kaldor hicks to achieve a pareto superior outcome

changes in the federal reserve s inflation target causes and consequences this paper estimates a new keynesian model to draw inferences about the behavior of the federal reserve s unobserved inflation target the results indicate that the target rose from 1 1 4 percent in 1959 to over 8 percent in the mid to late 1970s before falling back below 2 1 2 percent in 2004 the results also provide some support for the hypothesis that over the entire postwar period federal reserve policy has systematically translated short run price pressures set off by supply side shocks into more persistent movements in inflation itself although considerable uncertainty remains about the true source of shifts in the inflation target jel e31 e32 e52

estimating and testing the compensated double log demand model in spite of the proliferation of flexible functional forms for consumer demand systems the double log demand model continues to be popular especially in applied work calling for single equation models it is usually estimated in uncompensated form it can also be estimated in compensated form by deflating the income variable alone using stone s price index the compensated form has the same right hand side as a single equation version of the popular linear approximation to the almost ideal demand model facilitating the construction of a test for choosing between the two alternatives this paper demonstrates these results develops the specification test and illustrates its application using us meat consumption data simulations suggest that the test is well behaved with good power in typical applications

regular flexibility of nested ces functions in this paper we define the class of regular flexible functional forms as the class of cost functions which are globally well behaved and can provide a local approximation to any globally well behaved cost function we then offer a constructive proof of flexibility for the nonseparable n stage constant elasticity of substitution functional form nnces by describing a technique through which the nnces form can be parameterized so as to locally capture any regular configuration of input demands and second order curvature conditions

on the choice offunctional forms in agricultural production analysis empirical results obtained by an analyst may depend on prior choice of functional form three alternative parametric specifications of the cost function are considered these are generalized leontief translog and normalized quadratic functions performance of these functional forms is evaluated by allen elasticities of substitution biases in technical change and some theory based hypotheses all three parametric specifications yielded mixed results together empirical results reinforce the need for model specification searches

the nonlinear phillips curve and inflation forecast targeting symmetric versus asymmetric monetary policy rules we study a simple small dynamic economy that a policymaker is attempting to control via use of a monetary policy rule the model features a convex phillips curve in that positive deviations of aggregate demand from potential are more inflationary than negative deviations are disinflationary using dynamic optimization techniques we find that the form of the optimal monetary policy reaction function is asymmetric we show that in the optimal rule the interest rate is a nonlinear function of the deviation of inflation from its target and of output from potential with asymmetry optimal monetary policy becomes more active as uncertainty about the impact of policy increases we thus provide an important and novel theoretical reason why increased uncertainty can lead to more aggressive rather than toward more cautious optimal policies

term structure evidence on interest rate smoothing and monetary policy inertia abstract numerous studies have used quarterly data to estimate monetary policy rules or reaction functions that appear to exhibit a very slow partial adjustment of the policy interest rate the conventional wisdom asserts that this gradual adjustment reflects a policy inertia or interest rate smoothing behavior by central banks however such quarterly monetary policy inertia would imply a large amount of forecastable variation in interest rates at horizons of more than 3 months which is contradicted by evidence from the term structure of interest rates the illusion of monetary policy inertia evident in the estimated policy rules likely reflects the persistent shocks that central banks face

economic performance of flexible functional forms flexible functional forms are well behaved over restricted regions the outer domain and constitute good approximations of a hypothetical true technology set of preferences over only a subregion of the outer domain the inner domain comparison of such forms has been made in terms of outer domain ideally il should also cover the inner domain by definition however the inner domain is unquantifiable instead functions representing producer technology consumer preferences can be characterized and compared in terms of what we call in this paper economic performance focusing on the producer side we demonstrate that relative differences and associated implications for equilibrium modeling can be substantial

robustness of the estimates of the hybrid new keynesian phillips curve abstract gali and gertler 1999 inflation dynamics a structural econometric approach journal of monetary eonomics 44 2 195 222 developed a hybrid variant of the new keynesian phillips curve that relates inflation to real marginal cost expected future inflation and lagged inflation gmm estimates of the model suggest that forward looking behavior is dominant the coefficient on expected future inflation substantially exceeds the coefficient on lagged inflation while the latter differs significantly from zero it is quantitatively modest several authors have suggested that our results are the product of specification bias or suspect estimation methods here we show that these claims are incorrect and that our results are robust to a variety of estimation procedures including gmm estimation of the closed form and nonlinear instrumental variables also as we discuss many others have obtained very similar results to ours using a systems approach including fiml techniques hence the conclusions of gg and others regarding the importance of forward looking behavior remain robust

policy mandates and institutional architecture abstract the model developed in this paper examines the interaction between monetary and macroprudential policies in promoting macroeconomic stability highlighting the role of shocks and policy instruments the paper shows that assigning the mandates of monetary and financial stability to independent authorities enhances macroeconomic stability only when some level of coordination exists between policymakers and it is the dominant institutional arrangement when monetary stability is socially important instead when society values financial stability internalising the policy spillovers by assigning the two mandates to a single policymaker could become the dominant configuration depending on the model s parameter values

the fed s monetary policy rule and u s inflation the case of asymmetric preferences abstract this paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision makers are allowed but not required to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values the estimates of the central bank s euler equation indicate that the preferences of the fed had been asymmetric only before 1979 with the interest rate response to output contractions being larger than the response to output expansions of the same magnitude we show that this asymmetry on output implied an average inflation bias around 1 5 while the implicit inflation target also declined the asymmetric preferences induced inflation bias appears to account for a sizable fraction of the historical decline in the inflation mean

how does credit supply respond to monetary policy and bank minimum capital requirements abstract we use data on uk banks minimum capital requirements to study the interaction of monetary policy and capital requirement regulation uk banks were subject to both time varying capital requirements and changes in interest rate policy tightening of either capital requirements or monetary policy reduces the supply of lending lending by large banks reacts substantially to capital requirement changes but not to monetary policy changes lending by small banks reacts to both there is little evidence of interaction between these two policy instruments the differences in the responses of small and large banks identify important distributional consequences within the financial system of these two policy instruments finally our findings do not corroborate theoretical models that raise concerns about complex interactions between monetary policy and macro prudential variation in capital requirements

is bank supervision central to central banking whether central banks should play an active role in bank supervision and regulation is being debated both in the united states and abroad while the bank of england has recently been stripped of its supervisory responsibilities and several proposals in the united states have advocated removing bank supervision from the federal reserve system other countries are considering enhancing central bank involvement in this area many of the arguments for and against these proposals hinge on the effect this change would have on the ability of the central bank to conduct monetary policy we find that confidential supervisory information on bank ratings significantly improves

capital regulation and monetary policy with fragile banks optimizing banks subject to runs are introduced in a macro model to study the transmission of monetary policy and its interplay with bank capital regulation when banks are risky a monetary expansion and a positive productivity shock increase bank leverage and risk risk based capital requirements amplify the cycle and are welfare detrimental within a class of simple policy rules the best combination includes mildly anticyclical capital ratios as in basel iii and a response of monetary policy to asset prices or bank leverage

the risk taking channel of monetary policy transmission in the euro area abstract in this paper we provide evidence for a risk taking channel of monetary policy transmission in the euro area that works through the relaxation of lending standards for borrowers our dataset covers the period 2003q1 2016q2 and includes in addition to the standard variables for real gdp growth inflation and the monetary policy stance indicators of bank lending standards and bank lending margins based on vector autoregressive models with i recursive identification and ii sign restrictions we show that banks react aggressively to an expansionary monetary policy shock by lowering their lending standards the banks efforts to keep their lending margin stable however are not successful as we detect a significant compression we document these findings for the euro area as a whole and for its individual member states in particular banks in the netherlands portugal spain and ireland lowered their lending standards after expansionary monetary policy shocks the compression of the lending margin is most pronounced in the five crisis countries greece ireland italy portugal and spain