structural interpretation of vector autoregressions with incomplete identification revisiting the role of oil supply and demand shocks traditional approaches to structural vector autoregressions vars can be viewed as special cases of bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs these methods can be generalized with a less restrictive formulation that incorporates uncertainty about the identifying assumptions themselves we use this approach to revisit the importance of shocks to oil supply and demand supply disruptions turn out to be a bigger factor in historical oil price movements and inventory accumulation a smaller factor than implied by earlier estimates supply shocks lead to a reduction in global economic activity after a significant lag whereas shocks to oil demand do not

central bank design abstract starting with a blank slate how could one design the institutions of a central bank for the united states this paper explores the question of how to design a central bank drawing on the relevant economic literature and historical experiences while staying free from concerns about how the fed got to be what it is today or the short term political constraints it has faced at various times the goal is to provide an opinionated overview that puts forward the trade offs associated with different choices and identifies areas where there are clear messages about optimal central bank design

finance inflation and employment a post keynesian kaleckian analysis the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the post keynesian kaleckian macroeconomic literature we develop a macroeconomic model that explicitly integrates the role of borrowing and cash payment commitments on outstanding debt interest plus principal repayment into the consumption and investment expenditures as well as into the inflation generating process we explore the way that finance influences the distribution effects of inflation in the demand side of a money credit using economy we suggest a new phillips curve that encapsulates the impact of financial commitments on wage and profit claims we argue that high debt and cash payment commitments are likely to be associated with a positive demand side effect of inflation on the rate of employment and that they might be conducive to a negative supply side effect of employment on the inflation rate the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved

crises and exchange rate regimes time to break down the bipolar view we revisit the link between crises and exchange rate regimes err using a panel of 90 developed and developing countries over the period 1980 2009 we find that corner err are not more prone to crises compared to intermediate err this finding holds for different types of crises banking currency and debt and is robust to a wide set of alternative specifications consequently we clearly break down the traditional bipolar view countries that aim at preventing crisis episodes should focus less on the choice of the err and instead implement sound structural macroeconomic policies

price changes in the euro area and the united states some facts from individual consumer price data prices of goods and services do not adjust immediately in response to changing demand and supply conditions this paper characterizes the average frequency and size of price changes in the euro area and its member countries investigates the determinants of the probability of price changes and compares the evidence for the euro area with available u s results the facts documented in this paper are based on evidence from individual price data recorded at the store level in all euro area countries except ireland and greece that is in datasets covering austria belgium finland france germany italy luxembourg the netherlands portugal and spain which together account for around 97 percent of euro area gdp the data used are the monthly price records underlying the computation of national consumer price indices and harmonized consumer price indices these data cover a large number of products selected on the basis of extensive household budget surveys

what has and has not been learned about monetary policy in a low inflation environment a review of the 2000s as the world economy recovers from the worst financial crisis and most severe global slump in 75 years policymakers regulators and academics are focusing intensely and appropriately on lessons to be learned for monetary policy there are certainly many questions to answer among the most important are are inflation expectations well anchored what if any influence should asset quantities and prices have on monetary policy do we have sufficient confidence in our alternative monetary policy tools to stabilize the economy at the zero lower bound

collusion and overlending i introduction for a long time have korean companies been engaged in unbridled expansionism financed through loans inefficient octopus style management and over and duplicate investment thus expediting the structural failure of the economy this failure to concentrate on profits consolidation and efficiency provided the fuse to the bankruptcy bombs that triggered the foreign exchange and economic crises the collusion between the conglomerates financial sector and politicians made this financial monopoly possible chosun ilbo december 26 1997 collusion and overlending in the korean financial sector may be best illustrated by the above editorial highlight of chosun ilbo the most read newspaper in korea its 1997 financial crisis is primarily triggered by continual bankruptcies of chaebols conglomerates which with assistance from politicians had borrowed heavily from financial institutions in financing their investment projects 1 unlike some other asian countries experiencing problems in their financial sector due to shifts in investment projects toward real estates such as japan hong kong and thailand chaebols in korea concentrated mostly on manufacturing activities 2 in this study we establish a tractable model of overlending with three key players namely chaebols financial institutions and politicians as highlighted in chosun ilbo the model is designed to achieve two primary goals that are crucial for matching some key observations during the korean turmoil first we illustrate how overlending can be an equilibrium outcome with collusion between chaebols and politicians when the economic environment is favorable this occurs despite that such a collusion distorts normal borrowing lending operation by causing a discernible shift in loan composition from more to less productive investment projects second we show that as the economic environment gradually deteriorates there can be a shift from a collusion to a no collusion equilibrium the combination of deterioration in fundamentals and expectations of an equilibrium shift can trigger economy wide financial crisis more specifically we construct a simple principal supervisor agent model of corruption and overlending the principal is the formal authority of loan decision making of a financial institution or in short the financial institution the supervisor is a politician who serves as the informational intermediary in the borrowing lending arrangement via his her connections and networking 3 the agent is a chaebol of an unknown type which seeks for external financing of a set of risky projects a politician s favorable signal about the borrowing chaebol s overall performance would grant the approval of the loan to finance an array of risky projects whose returns depend on idiosyncratic shocks that cannot be washed out in aggregation within the chaebol as an outside alternative to making the loan the financial institution can invest in the world capital market where a fixed rate of return is guaranteed this portfolio decision depends on a comparison of the expected average returns on the given set of risky projects with the safe returns on investments in the world capital market while both the chaebol s type and the state of nature are unobservable to the financial institution we for simplicity assume that politician s connections and networking can fully uncover the true type of the chaebol this valuable information possessed by the politician is one that the financial institution has an incentive to purchase but a low type chaebol has an incentive to conceal whether the politician ends up revealing truthfully this information depends on how much to obtain from the lender in terms of general support versus how much to gain from the borrower in terms of bribes or side payments when a low type chaebol has the politician on its side information is distorted and a collusion equilibrium arises

devaluation without common knowledge in an economy with a fixed exchange rate regime that suffers a random adverse shock we study the strategies of imperfectly and sequentially informed speculators that may trigger an endogenous devaluation before it occurs exogenously the game played by the speculators has a unique symmetric nash equilibrium which is a strongly rational expectation equilibrium in the set of all strategies with delay uncertainty about the extent to which the central bank is ready to defend the peg extends the ex ante mean delay between the exogenous shock and the devaluation we determine endogenously the rate of devaluation

models of currency crises with self fulfilling features the discomfort a government suffers from speculation against its currency determines the strategic incentives of speculators and the scope for multiple currency market equilibria after describing an illustrative model in which high unemployment may cause an exchange rate crisis with self fulfilling features the paper reviews some other self reinforcing mechanisms recent econometric evidence seems consistent with the practical importance of these mechanisms

monetary mystique secrecy and central banking abstract the paper contains a discussion of the role of secrecy in the implementation of monetary policy it documents the federal reserve s defense of secrecy as argued in a recent freedom of information act suit the federal reserve s arguments are evaluated on the basis of economic theory theoretical papers related to the secrecy issue are reviewed the discussion highlights a number of potential benefits and costs of central bank secrecy and identifies some conditions under which secrecy could be socially beneficial

the politics of speculative attacks in industrial democracies recent models of speculative currency crises contend that market expectations of policy behavior can trigger a speculative attack we argue that political processes and partisan objectives inform expectations about the government s commitment to the exchange rate first market actors anticipate periods when the partisan identity of a government may change through an election or a cabinet collapse second party labels provide information to currency traders about the policy objectives of a potential government consequently we contend that the probability of a speculative attack will be higher when markets expect the cabinet to end and when the cabinet dissolution is likely to produce a leftward shift in policy a discrete timesurvival model is used to estimate the probability that a cabinet will dissolve in any given month for sixteen parliamentary democracies from 1970 to 1995 the predicted values are then used as a proxy for market expectations in a model of speculative currency crises

money growth targeting by the bundesbank abstract the recent debate over monetary strategies concludes that monetary and inflation targeting lead to very similar patterns of central bank behavior why then do central banks insist on the strategies they use in this paper we develop an answer from political economy arguing that monetary strategies are helpful in solving internal and external coordination problems for the central bank we illustrate the point by reviewing the bundesbank s experience with money growth targeting in the mid 1970s monetary targeting was a signal that the previous monetary regime had been overcome and a means to define the role of monetary policy vis a vis other players in the macroeconomic policy game and to structure the internal monetary policy debate

seigniorage revenue deficits and self fulfilling currency crises abstract this paper examines potential resolutions to the conflict between a fixed exchange rate and seigniorage revenue requirement of a stylized developing economy that gives rise to a currency crisis the government has an informational advantage and can decide when it is optimal to invoke an escape clause i e to drop the peg and float speculators must guess when the crisis will happen based on their assessment of the probability of collapse and this makes pegged exchange rate equilibria unstable

nobel lecture the transformation of macroeconomic policy and research what i am going to describe for you is a revolution in macroeconomics a transformation in methodology that has reshaped how we conduct our science prior to the transformation macroeconomics was largely separate from the rest of economics indeed some considered the study of macroeconomics fundamentally different and thought there was no hope of integrating macroeconomics with the rest of economics that is with neoclassical economics others held the view that neoclassical foundations for the empirically determined macro relations would in time be developed neither view proved correct finn kydland and i have been lucky to be a part of this revolution and my address will focus heavily on our role in advancing this transformation now all stories about transformation have three essential parts the time prior to the key change the transformative era and the new period that has been affected by the change and that is the story i am going to tell how macroeconomic policy and research changed as a result of the transformation of macroeconomics from constructing a system of equations of the national accounts to an investigation of dynamic stochastic model economies

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

real wage rigidities and the new keynesian model most central banks perceive a trade off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the gap between output and desired output however the standard new keynesian framework implies no such trade off in that framework stabilizing inflation is equivalent to stabilizing the welfare relevant output gap in this paper we argue that this property of the new keynesian framework which we call the divine coincidence is due to a special feature of the model the absence of nontrivial real imperfections we focus on one such real imperfection namely real wage rigidities when the baseline new keynesian model is extended to allow for real wage rigidities the divine coincidence disappears and central banks indeed face a trade off between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing the welfare relevant output gap we show that not only does the extended model have more realistic normative implications but it also has appealing positive properties in particular it provides a natural interpretation for the dynamic inflation unemployment relation found in the data

menu costs and phillips curves this paper develops a model of a monetary economy in which individual firms are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks as well as general inflation sellers can change price only by incurring a real menu cost we calibrate this cost and the variance and autocorrelation of the idiosyncratic shock using a new u s data set of individual prices due to klenow and kryvtsov the prediction of the calibrated model for the effects of high inflation on the frequency of price changes accords well with international evidence from various studies the model is also used to conduct numerical experiments on the economy s response to various shocks in none of the simulations we conducted did monetary shocks induce large or persistent real responses

the mirage of fixed exchange rates this paper discusses the profound difficulties of maintaining fixed exchange rates in a world of expanding global capital markets contrary to popular wisdom industrialized country monetary authorities easily have the resources to defend exchange parities against virtually any private speculative attack but if their commitment to use those resources lacks credibility with markets the costs to the broader economy of defending an exchange rate peg can be very high the dynamic interplay between credibility and commitment is illustrated by the 1992 swedish and british crises and the 1994 95 mexican collapse we also discuss the small number of successful fixers

delaying the inevitable interest rate defense and balance of payments crises the classical model of balance of payments crises implicitly assumes that the central bank sits passively as international reserves dwindle in practice however central banks typically defend pegs aggressively by raising short term interest rates this paper analyzes the feasibility and optimality of raising interest rates to delay a potential bop crisis interest rate policy works through two distinct channels by raising demand for domestic interest bearing liquid assets higher interest rates tend to delay the crisis higher interest rates however increase public debt service and imply higher future inflation which tends to bring forward the crisis we show that under certain conditions it is feasible to delay the crisis but raising interest rates beyond a certain point may actually hasten the crisis a similar nonmonotonic relationship emerges between welfare and the increase in interest rates it is thus optimal to engage in some active interest rate defense but only up to a certain point i

the quest for prosperity without inflation abstract in recent years activist monetary policy rules responding to inflation and the level of economic activity have been advanced as a means of achieving effective output stabilization without inflation advocates of such policies suggest that their flexibility may yield substantial stabilization benefits while avoiding the excesses of overzealous discretionary fine tuning such as is thought to characterize the experience of the 1960s and 1970s in this study i present evidence suggesting that these conclusions are misguided using an estimated model i show that when informational limitations are properly accounted for activist policies would not have averted the great inflation but instead would have resulted in worse macroeconomic performance than the actual historical experience the problem can be attributed in large part to the counterproductive reliance of these policies on the output gap the analysis suggests that the dismal economic outcomes of the great inflation may have resulted from an unfortunate pursuit of activist policies in the face of bad measurement specifically overoptimistic assessments of the output gap associated with the productivity slowdown of the late 1960s and early 1970s

a new breed of exchange rate bands chile israel and mexico following inflation stabilization programmes where a fixed exchange rate is used as an anchor a number of countries have gradually shifted towards a regime of increased flexibility in particular chile israel and mexico have adopted for a few years a regime of crawling exchange rate bands this article documents and analyzes their unique experience of immediate concern is the question whether the shift from fixed to crawling bands is perceived as the signal of a tilt towards policy relaxation on the contrary it could be seen as a way of restoring external competitiveness after a period of real appreciation the evidence collected in this article supports the latter view as a way of moving towards a sustainable equilibrium the shift to crawling bands is found to have a stabilizing influence on financial markets on inflation expectations and on the passthrough from exchange rates to prices

price level determinacy with an interest rate policy rule and rational expectations abstract this paper reconsiders a result obtained by sargent and wallace namely that price level indeterminacy obtains in their model if the monetary authorities adopt a feedback rule for the interest rate rather than the money stock it is shown that the indeterminacy vanishes if the interest rate rule is chosen so as to have a desired effect on the expected quantity of money demanded this holds even if considerable weight is given in the choice of a rule to the aim of smoothing interest rate fluctuations

the effects of additive outliers on tests for unit roots and cointegration this article discusses the properties of the univariate dickey fuller test and the johansen test for the cointegrating rank when there exist additive outlying observations in the time series we provide analytical as well as numerical evidence that additive outliers may produce spurious stationary hence the dickey fuller test will reject a unit root too frequently and the johansen test will indicate too many cointegrating vectors the results easily generalize to models with temporary change outliers through an empirical example we discuss how additive and temporary change outliers can be detected in practice and we show how dummy variables can be used to remove the influence of such extreme observations

inflation determination with taylor rules is new keynesian analysis critically flawed abstract cochrane 2007 has strongly questioned the basic economic logic of current monetary policy analysis arguing that new keynesian nk models imply rational expectations paths with explosive inflation that do not imply explosions in real variables relevant for transversality conditions consequently the usual logic does not rule out solutions with explosive inflation that result does not however justify negative conclusions about nk analysis for a different criterion is logically satisfactory it is that to be plausible a re solution must satisfy the property of least squares learnability adoption of this criterion serves to justify in principle the bulk of current mainstream analysis

seeing like the fed culture cognition and framing in the failure to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008 one of the puzzles about the financial crisis of 2008 is why regulators particularly the federal open market committee fomc were so slow to recognize the impending collapse of the financial sys

how the world achieved consensus on monetary policy the worldwide progress in monetary policy is a great achievement and especially considering the situation 30 years ago a remarkable success story i describe how the world achieved a working consensus on the core principles of monetary policy by the late 1990s i survey the muddled state of affairs in the 1970s and then ask what happened in federal reserve policy to produce an understanding of the practical principles of monetary policy how did formal institutional support for targeting low inflation abroad follow from an international acceptance of these ideas and how did a consensus theoretical model develop in academia i explain how the modern theoretical consensus known alternatively as the new neoclassical synthesis or the new keynesian model of monetary policy reinforces key advances the priority for price stability the targeting of core rather than headline inflation the importance of credibility for low inflation and preemptive interest rate policy supported by transparent objectives and procedures of course a working consensus does not constitute complete agreement accordingly the conclusion identifies important monetary policy issues that remain to be explored

learning large deviations and recurrent currency crises this article studies a version of obstfeld s journal of international economics 43 1997 61 77 escape clause model the model is calibrated to produce three rational expectations equilibria two of these equilibria are e stable and one is unstable dynamics are introduced by assuming that agents must learn about the government s decision rule it is assumed they do this using a stochastic approximation algorithm it turns out that as a certain parameter describing the sensitivity of beliefs to new information gets small the algorithm converges to a small noise diffusion process the dynamics of exchange rate changes are then characterized using large deviation techniques from freidlin and wentzell random perturbations of dynamical systems second edition berlin springer verlag 1998 these methods describe the sense in which the limiting distribution of exchange rate changes is approximated by a two state markov switching process where the two states correspond to the two e stable equilibria the model is calibrated to the exchange rate histories of argentina brazil and mexico currency crises in these countries resemble the predicted escape routes of the model a key feature of these escape routes is that expectations of a devaluation erupt suddenly without large contemporaneous shocks this is consistent with evidence showing that crises are often poorly anticipated by financial markets

determinants and costs of current account reversals under heterogeneity and serial correlation using large panel data sets for analysis of determinants and costs of reversals asks for controls of latent heterogeneity among countries this article performs a bayesian analysis which allows for a parsimonious yet flexible handling of country specific heterogeneity via random coefficients and serially correlated errors consideration of persistence within the employed macroeconomic data is important to gauge the impact of explaining variables suggested by theory correctly bayesian specification tests provide evidence in favour of models incorporating heterogeneity and serial correlation the results suggest that costs of reversals are overestimated when country specific heterogeneity is neglected and stress the importance of external variables in explaining current account reversals results are checked for robustness against the underlying reversal definition

optimal monetary policy in a small open economy with staggered wage and price contracts abstract we study optimal monetary policy for a small open economy in a model where both domestic prices and wages are sticky due to staggered contracts the simultaneous presence of the two forms of nominal rigidities introduces an additional trade off between domestic inflation and the output gap we derive a second order approximation to the average welfare losses that can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the output gap domestic price inflation and wage inflation as a consequence the optimal policy seeks to minimize a weighted average of these variances we analyze welfare implications of several alternative simple policy rules and find that domestic price inflation targeting generates relatively large welfare losses whereas cpi inflation targeting performs nearly as well as the optimal rule

terms of trade and real exchange rates the canadian evidence abstract this paper presents empirical evidence linking the canada us real exchange rate with the terms of trade using recently developed econometric methods for nondashstationary data we find that the real exchange rate is cointegrated with terms of trade variables and that causality runs from the terms of trade to the exchange rate we then construct a simple exchange rate equation that satisfies several specification tests and performs better than a random walk in post sample forecasting experiments the results suggest that much of the variation in the real exchange rate is attributable to movements in the terms of trade and that the influence of monetary factors is secondary

cross country differences in the effects of oil shocks abstract we compare the macroeconomic consequences of several types of oil shocks across a set of industrialized countries that are structurally very diverse with respect to the role of oil and other forms of energy in the economy the results crucially depend on the underlying source of the oil price shift when a rise in oil prices is caused by increased global economic activity or a rise in oil specific demand almost all countries experience respectively a temporary increase and transitory decline of real gdp the role of oil and other forms of energy cannot explain the differences in the effects of both shocks across countries in contrast this role is very important to explain asymmetries in the effects of exogenous oil supply shocks whereas net oil and energy importing countries typically face a permanent fall in economic activity the impact is insignificant or even positive in net energy exporting countries in addition countries that improved their net energy position the most over time became less vulnerable to oil supply shocks relative to other countries

information expectations and monetary policy keynes s and friedman s complementary lessons for today this paper considers what lessons there might be for our contemporary monetary consensus in keynes s and friedman s respective policy principles i focus first on the expectations issue for both keynes and friedman monetary policy aims at the stabilisation of expectations and in both cases major issues arise for knowledge and uncertainty although each conceives this in a different manner next i deal with the core of monetary policy principles while keynes s approach is at odds with our modern strategy of inflation targeting friedman would warn us that even in this case interest rate manipulation might not be the appropriate approach the analysis concludes with the issue of interest rate determination the issue of intertemporal coordination and financial stability policy principles are always rooted in theoretical investigation keynes s approach is based upon an analysis of intertemporal coordination failures whereas friedman s policy schemes require that financial markets be made perfectly competitive

gold monetization and gold discipline gold and its price have emerged as frequent topics of both academic and government debate 2 public attention focused on the gold market since gold s price began fluctuating violently in 1980 and 1981 has turned to gold as a possible means of removing some discretion inherent in the current fiat money system since lack of adherence to monetary rules can lead to problems of dynamic policy inconsistency academic economists have begun seriously to reconsider monetary standards based either on gold or on some other commodity as politically feasible methods of establishing rules 3

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

oil price drivers geopolitical uncertainty and oil exporters currencies abstract empirical relationships between crude oil prices and exchange rates of oil exporting countries tend to vary over time i use econometric models of the norwegian and canadian nominal exchange rates to investigate whether such time variation could reflect shifts in the key drivers of oil prices over time results suggest that demand and supply driven oil price increases strengthen these currencies to different extents in contrast heightened geopolitical uncertainty and associated oil price increases go together with a weakening of oil exporters currencies the latter result may explain coincidences of higher oil prices and a weakening of oil exporters currencies

trade linkages and macroeconomic effects of the price of oil in this paper we assess the impact of oil price shocks on oil producer and oil consuming economies var models for different countries are linked together via a trade matrix as in abeysinghe 2001 as expected we find that oil producers here russia and canada benefit from oil price shocks for example a large oil shock leading to a price increase of 50 boosts russian gdp by about 6 however oil producers are hurt by indirect effects of positive oil price shocks as economic activity in their exporter countries suffers for oil consumers the effects are more diverse in some countries output falls in response to an oil price shock while other countries seem to be relatively immune to oil price changes finally indirect effects are also detected for oil consumer countries those countries which trade more with oil producers gain indirect benefits via higher demand from oil producing countries in general the largest negative total effects from positive oil price shocks are found for japan china the usa finland and switzerland while other countries in our sample seem to have fared quite well during recent positive oil price shocks the indirect effects are negative for russia finland germany and netherlands

the benefits and costs of monetary union in southern africa a critical survey of the literature with the 14 members of the southern african development community sadc having set the objective of adopting a common currency for the year 2018 an expanding empirical literature has emerged evaluating the benefits and costs of a common currency area in southern africa this paper reviews that literature focusing on two categories of studies 1 those that assume that a country s characteristics are invariant to the adoption of a common currency and 2 those that assume that a monetary union alters an economy s structure resulting in trade creation and credibility gains the literature reviewed suggests that a relatively small group of countries typically including south africa satisfies the criteria necessary for monetary unification the literature also suggests that in a monetary union comprising all sadc countries and a regional central bank that sets monetary policy to reflect the average economic conditions e g fiscal balances in the region the potential losses i e higher inflation from giving up an existing credible national central bank a relevant consideration for south africa could outweigh any potential benefits of trade creation resulting from a common currency

optimal interest rate smoothing this paper considers the desirability of the observed tendency of central banks to adjust interest rates only gradually in response to changes in economic conditions it shows in the context of a simple model of optimizing private sector behaviour that assignment of an interest rate smoothing objective to the central bank may be desirable even when reduction of the magnitude of interest rate changes is not a social objective in itself this is because a response of policy to irrelevant lagged variables may be desirable owing to the way it steers private sector expectations of future policy

inflation targeting a new framework for monetary policy he world s central bankers and their staffs meet regularly in venues from basle to washington to share ideas and discuss common problems perhaps these frequent meetings help explain why changes in the tactics and strategy of monetary policymaking such as the adoption of money growth targets in the 1970s the intensification of efforts to reduce inflation in the 1980s and the recent push for increased institutional independence for central banks tend to occur in many countries more or less simultaneously whatever their source major changes in the theory and practice of central banking are of great importance for both individual countries and the international economy in this article we discuss a new strategy for monetary policy known as inflation targeting which has sparked much interest and debate among central bankers and monetary economists in recent years this approach is characterized as the name suggests by the announcement of official target ranges for the inflation rate at one or more horizons and by explicit acknowledgment that low and stable inflation is the overriding goal of monetary policy other important features of inflation targeting include increased communication with the public about the plans and objectives of the monetary policymakers and in many cases increased accountability of the central bank

monetary policy as financial stability regulation this paper develops a model that speaks to the goals and methods of financialstability policies there are three main points first from a normative perspective the model defines the fundamental market failure to be addressed namely that unregulated private money creation can lead to an externality in which intermediaries issue too much short term debt and leave the system excessively vulnerable to costly financial crises second it shows how in a simple economy where commercial banks are the only lenders conventional monetary policy tools such as open market operations can be used to regulate this externality while in more advanced economies it may be helpful to supplement monetary policy with other measures third from a positive perspective the model provides an account of how monetary policy can influence bank lending and real activity even in a world where prices adjust frictionlessly and there are other transactions media besides bank created money that are outside the control of the central bank

reserve accumulation and financial crises from individual protection to systemic risk abstract this paper provides a new perspective on the relationship between countries international reserve holdings and financial crises while the local view holds that reserves may prevent domestic crises it overlooks that the accumulation of reserves relaxes the financing constraint of the reserve currency country and may cause a financial crisis in the centre which is transmitted globally according to this global view reserve accumulation might destabilize the international financial system since the crisis affects all countries alike the accumulation of reserves imposes a negative externality on non accumulating countries we integrate this idea in a theoretical model of the optimal amount of reserves and illustrate the gap between local and global optimality the consideration of systemic risk lowers the demand for reserves moreover if a supranational authority determines the optimal level of reserves it internalizes the negative externality and accumulates fewer reserves a macroprudential tax on reserve hoardings might implement the socially optimal solution our calibration analysis shows that these considerations are economically significant they lower the optimal amount of reserves in the benchmark case by 45

forecasting core inflation the case of south africa forecasting and estimating core inflation has recently gained attention especially for inflation targeting countries following research showing that targeting headline inflation may not be optimal a central bank can miss the signal due to the noise despite its importance there is sparse literature on estimating and forecasting core inflation in south africa with the focus still on measuring core inflation this paper emphasises predicting core inflation using large time varying parameter vector autoregressive models tvp vars factor augmented var and structural break models using quarterly data from 1981q1 to 2013q4 we use mean squared forecast errors msfe and predictive likelihoods to evaluate the forecasts in general we find that i small tvp vars consistently outperform all other models ii models where the errors are heteroscedastic do better than models with homoscedastic errors iii models assuming that the forgetting factor remains 0 99 throughout the forecast period outperforms models that allow for the forgetting factors to change with time and iv allowing for structural break does not improve the predictability of core inflation overall our results imply that additional information on the growth rate of the economy and interest rate is sufficient to forecast core inflation accurately but the relationship between these three variables needs to be modelled in a time varying nonlinear fashion

time varying dynamics of the norwegian economy we use tvp var models to investigate possible changes in the time series properties of key norwegian macroeconomic variables since the 1980s notably we find that inflation persistence falls during the inflation targeting period while the volatility of inflation and nominal exchange rates increases observed time variation in correlations between interest rates and the macro variables largely reflect prevailing monetary policy regimes an increase in the correlations between oil prices and other macro variables over time is also documented a counterfactual analysis discusses the observed time varying dynamics of the norwegian economy in the light of monetary policy and oil price shocks this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

monetary targets as a policy rule lessons from the swiss experience abstract this paper provides a survey and analysis of swiss monetary policy since the shift to a floating exchange rate in 1973 although the swiss national bank snb by international comparison managed to achieve a high degree of price stability it could not prevent temporary bursts of inflation i argue that the problem lay in an inappropriate snb response to such disturbances as unexpected exchange rate shocks and show that in constructing optimum feedback rules the snb must take account of the logs in the effects of monetary policy i also discuss the snb s current strategy resting on a medium term growth target for the monetary base

escaping from a liquidity trap and deflation the foolproof way and others existing proposals to escape from a liquidity trap and deflation including my foolproof way are discussed in the light of the optimal way to escape the optimal way involves three elements 1 an explicit central bank commitment to a higher future price level 2 a concrete action that demonstrates the central bank s commitment induces expectations of a higher future price level and jump starts the economy and 3 an exit strategy that specifies when and how to get back to normal a currency depreciation is a direct consequence of expectations of a higher future price level and hence an excellent indicator of those expectations furthermore an intentional currency depreciation and a crawling peg as in the foolproof way can implement the optimal way and in particular induce the desired expectations of a higher future price level i conclude that the foolproof way is likely to work well for japan which is in a liquidity trap now as well as for the euro area and the united states in case either would fall into a liquidity trap in the future

rational and self fulfilling balance of payments crises speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes occur ifasset price paths are to be free of abnormal profit opportunities suchattacks are fully rational as they reflect the market s response to aregime breakdown that is inevitable the authors shows that under someexpectations about policy balance of payments crises can also be purely self fulfilling events in such cases even a permanently viableregime may collapse and the economy will possess multiple equilibriacorresponding to different subjective assessments of the probability ofa crisis the behavior of the domestic interest rate will naturally reflect the possibility of a speculative attack copyright 1986 by american economic association

currency crises with the threat of an interest rate defence while virtually all currency crisis models recognise that the decision to abandon a peg depends on how tenaciously policy makers defend it this is seldom modelled explicitly we add the threat of an interest rate defence to the global game model of morris and shin american economic review 88 1998 with an endogenous defence actions of speculators may become strategic substitutes instead of the usual complements nevertheless our generalised model remains tractable and has a unique threshold equilibrium it provides additional insights for instance the threat of an interest rate defence makes speculation riskier and this may be sufficient to keep speculators out when fundamentals are still relatively strong

business as usual market crashes and wisdom after the fact the authors present a three stage model of market dynamics in the first stage routine behavior tends to keep information of common interest trapped in private hands in the second stage private information reaches a threshold that triggers some agents to alter their behavior these actions release information to the market the final stage involves the market s response to this news as other participants react to the initial departure from routine behavior the authors present an application to industry investment they also outline applications to the international debt crisis to bank runs and to political upheavals copyright 1994 by american economic association

coordination of speculation abstract we extend the models of krugman journal of money credit and banking 11 1979 311 and flood and garber journal of international economics 17 1984 1 on balance of payments crises to a multi country setting such that coordination among speculators is important for a focal point to emerge the moment of successful coordination when the currency is devalued is shown to depend on initial beliefs the degree of imperfect communication the rate of domestic credit creation and the number of countries that have overvalued currencies contagion arises naturally in our framework subsequent speculative attacks occur faster and faster and communication among speculators results in fluctuating stocks of reserves prior to the attack

the international monetary system forty years after bretton woods review essay in may 1984 a distinguished group of central bankers and economists gathered for a conference at bretton woods to consider the evolution of the world monetary system that was born at that location forty years earlier this volume contains nine essays with accompanying discussion on issues of performance and reform of current international monetary arrangements these papers deal with problems facing the industrialized and the lessdeveloped countries and assess the institutions that have been set up to accommodate these problems the major accomplishments of the original bretton woods conference were of course the establishment of the system of payments based on fixed exchange rates and the organization of the world bank and the international monetary fund as the order developed in the late 40 s and early 50 s each central bank saw it as its duty to intervene in foreign exchange markets to ensure an essentially fixed parity of their currency with respect to the dollar the role of the u s was to guarantee the dollar price of gold at 35 an ounce the system has been called a dollar standard because the dollar played the role of a reserve currency one of the paradoxes of the system as robert triffin pointed out in the early 60 s is that in order to produce a continuing and rapid enough expansion of world reserves the u s had to run balance of payments deficits yet continued deficits by the u s threatened the convertibility of the dollar into gold as it happened the system of fixed parities broke down in the early 70 s not because of a lack of reserves but because a glut of dollars made the bretton woods dollar exchange rates untenable the system eventually evolved into one in which most of the industrialized countries currencies more or less are determined by the market while the currencies of most second and third world countries are pegged to a major currency the floating period has been

the collapse of the mexican peso what have we learned the collapse of the mexican peso what have we learned in the first quarter of 1995 mexico found itself in the grip of an intense financial panic foreign investors fled the country despite very high interest rates an undervalued currency and financial indicators that pointed to long term solvency the fundamental conditions of the mexican economy cannot account for the extent of the crisis the crisis was not the result of irresponsible fiscal behaviour the crisis was due to unexpected shocks that occurred in 1994 the inadequate policy response to those shocks the increased vulnerability to panic and finally panic itself in the aftermath of the march assassination the exchange rate experienced a nominal devaluation of around 10 and interest rates increased by 7 percentage points however capital outflows continued the policy response was to maintain the exchange rate rule and to prevent further increases in interest rates interest rates were held down by expanding domestic credit and by converting short term peso denominated government liabilities cetes falling due into dollar denominated bonds tesobonos a fall in international reserves and an increase in short term dollar denominated debt resulted the government simply ended up illiquid and therefore financially vulnerable illiquidity exposed mexico to a self fulfilling panic jeffrey sachs aaron tornell and andres velasco

oil prices and exchange rates the quotations show a sharply divergent pattern in the response of the foreign exchange market to announcements of oil price increases during the first oil shock news about oil price rises led to a strengthening of the dollar whereas during the i979 surge of oil prices the reverse was generally true when the news was not so bad as feared the dollar fell back in i974 but rose in i979 in 1980 the pattern shifted once again back to dollar appreciation is there a rational fundamental explanation for the behaviour of the foreign exchange market or is it a matter of traders responding to what other traders arbitrarily think it is difficult to resolve this question but some insight can be provided through an analytical examination of the relationship between oil price increases and exchange rates the paper begins with a theoretical framework for analysing the relation between oil prices and exchange rates and then uses the theory to explain the behaviour of the foreign exchange market

identification in macroeconomics abstract this paper discusses empirical approaches macroeconomists use to answer questions like what does monetary policy do how large are the effects of fiscal stimulus what caused the great recession why do some countries grow faster than others identification of causal effects plays two roles in this process in certain cases progress can be made using the direct approach of identifying plausibly exogenous variation in a policy and using this variation to assess the effect of the policy however external validity concerns limit what can be learned in this way carefully identified causal effects estimates can also be used as moments in a structural moment matching exercise we use the term identified moments as a short hand for estimates of responses to identified structural shocks or what applied microeconomists would call causal effects we argue that such identified moments are often powerful diagnostic tools for distinguishing between important classes of models and thereby learning

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

the economics of convention c onventions regulate much of economic and social life yet they have received surprisingly little attention from economists by a convention we mean a pattern of behavior that is customary expected and self enforcing everyone conforms everyone expects others to conform and everyone has good reason to conform because conforming is in each person s best interest when everyone else plans to conform lewis 1969 familiar examples include following rules of the road adhering to conventional codes of dress and using words with their conventional meanings conventions with direct economic implications include species of money and credit industrial and technological standards accounting rules and forms of economic contracts indeed it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that almost all economic and social institutions are governed to some extent by convention the main feature of a convention is that out of a host of conceivable choices only one is actually used this fact also explains why conventions are needed they resolve problems of indeterminacy in interactions that have multiple equilibria indeed from a formal point of view we may define a convention as an equilibrium that everyone expects in interactions that have more than one equilibrium the economic significance of conventions is that they reduce transaction costs imagine the inconvenience if whenever two vehicles approached one another the important exceptions are sugden 1986 and ullman margalit 1977 the interested reader might also refer to the symposium on social norms that appeared in the fall 1989 issue of this journal with articles by sugden 1989 and elster 1989

toward a new microfounded macroeconomics in the wake of the crisis the great recession that followed the financial crisis of 2007 is not only the largest economic crisis after the great depression of the 1930s it also signals a crisis of economics as a discipline this is not only the consequence of the inadequacy of mainstream macroeconomics and specifically the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge workhorse model to forecast such a huge event or at least to detect the worrying tendencies towards it even more relevant is the choice to explicitly avoid the modeling of large crises that for someone is a motivation for not attacking pre crisis dsge models focused on the analysis of small deviations from the steady state so denying the intrinsic nature of capitalism a system that necessarily proceeds through cycles and extended crises the replies of the dsge approach to critics have led to extensions regarding for instance the role of financial frictions heterogeneous agents and bounded rationality though typically in the form of quasi rational expectations the alternative paradigm of agent based ab macroeconomics can take into account all these elements at once within an evolutionary modeling framework based on heterogeneity and interaction so capable to endogenously reproduce complex dynamics from small fluctuations to large crises due to innovation and industrial dynamics rising inequality and financial instability and so on the integration between ab macroeconomics and the post keynesian stock flow consistent approach represents a promising way for the future development of this research field

the incredible volcker disinflation abstract the reduction in inflation that occurred in the early 1980s when the federal reserve was headed by paul volcker is arguably the most widely discussed and visible macroeconomic event of the last 50 years of u s history inflation had been dramatically rising but under volcker the fed first contained and then reversed this process using a simple modern macroeconomic model we argue that the real effects of the volcker disinflation were mainly due to its imperfect credibility in our view the observed upward volatility and subsequent stubborn elevation of long term interest rates during the disinflation are key indicators of that imperfect credibility studying transcripts of the federal open market committee recently released to the public we find to our surprise that volcker and other fomc members likewise regarded the long term interest rates as indicative of inflation expectations and of the credibility of their disinflationary policy drawing from the transcripts and other contemporary sources we consider the interplay of monetary targets operating procedures and credibility during the volcker disinflation

out of the corridor keynes and the crisis we should learn from keynes to focus on the macroproblems of our day today s problem is the financial crisis and the resulting great recession neither the standard keynesian policies of decades past nor the monetary policy doctrine of recent years provides useful solutions dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory is part of the crisis wreckage but turning to old or to new keynesian theory will be of little use a balance sheet recession requires that policy address the problems in the private sector s capital as well as its income accounts we need serious theoretical work on problems of system stability using for example agent based methods monetary theory needs to develop analysis of processes in which intertemporal budget constraints are violated network theory will be useful in that quest

estimating the economic impacts of power supply interruptions abstract the cost of power system rationing which is a crucial parameter for determining optimal resilience investments is usually estimated using reduced form linear models or ordinary input output analysis however such methods do not properly address either consumers rational reactions to rationing policy or policy design nonlinearities to solve this problem this paper estimates the effects of power system rationing using a general equilibrium model the model solution shows that the power cut distribution among industries is a critical variable for quantifying policy effects and provides insights into optimal policy design