In this paper, I focus on two aspects of central banking ‐ flexibility and transparency ‐ that have been affected by monetary policy debates over the past twenty years. Because criticism of inflation targeting, at least in the United States, often focuses on the claim that an inflation targeting central bank may ignore real economic fluctuations, I direct my comments to the role real objectives play in the design of optimal monetary policy. That is, I focus on how flexible the central bank should be. I argue that, while the recent trend in the academic literature to view central bank objectives as derived from the welfare of the representative agent can be insightful, this perspective is not the only one for thinking about the goals assigned to the central bank. There are reasons why the objectives of a central bank should, potentially, deviate from social welfare, and I will focus on two such reasons; one related to imperfect monitoring and accountability, the other arising from asymmetric information.
This paper surveys the implications of uncertainty for the design of monetary policy. Among the topics discussed are the impact of imperfect or noisy information on the performance of simple rules, the performance of rules that are robust to the exogenous disturbance processes, the effects of parameter uncertainty, and the implications of robust control. The analysis is conducted using a new Keynesian framework. One finding is that difference rules seem to perform well in the presence of imperfect information about the output gap.
Abstract This chapter examines the impact of capital movements on the international capital markets. It argues that controls over bank liabilities, such as regulation-Q ceilings on deposit interest rates in the United States, were effective prudential controls when the United States was an emerging market. This chapter suggests that there is an interesting relationship between domestic liberalization and the liberalization of international capital flows which include advantages in terms of resource allocation.
Todo banco central debe tomar sus decisiones de politica en medio de un escenario incierto, basandose en su conocimiento imperfecto y cambiante sobre la economia. Aunque la investigacion sobre politica monetaria con incertidumbre y aprendizaje ha encontrado pocos resultados generales, una leccion contundente es que no se puede pasar por alto ni una ni otro. Este articulo hace una revision selectiva de la literatura existente sobre la incertidumbre y el aprendizaje, con enfasis en lo que atane a la conduccion de la politica monetaria. Luego analiza la investigacion de frontera presentada en la ultima conferencia anual del Banco Central de Chile, que reune nuevos resultados teoricos y evidencia empirica valida tanto para paises desarrollados como para la economia chilena.
We parameterize central-bank independence in terms of partisanship and term length, and we focus on the implications of alternative policy structures for real economic activity. While long terms of office for the central banker can reduce the role of electoral surprises, term lengths that are too long are costly if societal preferences are subject to permanent shifts. The appointment of a conservative central banker increases the optimal term length and leads to lower average inflation but need not increase the volatility of output.
These codes are used in the second edition of Carl Walsh, Monetary Theory and Policy, MIT Press 2003. Many use the toolkit of Harald Uhlig, which is included. The models are: cash in advance, money in the utility function, a basic new keynesian model, nominal income growth and inflation targeting.
The Federal Reserve has been criticized for allowing the base from which it calculates its target growth paths for the monetary aggregatesto drift from year to year in response to past deviations from target.Drift in the base implies that target misses permanently affect the levels of the monetary aggregates. Using a simple theoretical model, this paper shows that the optimal degree of base drift consistent withprice stability depends on the importance of permanent versus transitory income and velocity disturbances. Neither zero base drift nor complete base drift are likely to be compatible with price stability. Copyright 1986 by American Economic Association.
In the household sector of the Flow of Funds Accounts, the difference between net acquisition of financial assets and net financial savings is equal to a statistical discrepancy which is often quite large relative to the reported changes in asset holdings. This means that the budget restrictions emphasized in the Brainard-Tobin approach to specifying asset demand equations are not satisfied by the data commonly used to estimate such equations. The view adopted in this paper is that the statistical discrepancy should be thought of as resulting from measurement error in the Flow of Funds data. By imposing a structure on the measurement error, a consistent estimator is developed and used to estimate asset demand equations for the household sector. The demand equations are similar in specification to those used by others so that the results allow a direct assessment of the effects of alternative treatments of the statistical discrepancy. The empirical results suggest that qualitative conclusions about the effects of financial flows and interest rates on asset demands are not affected by the way the statistical discrepancy is treated. Quantitative conclusions are, however, affected.
This paper studies a channel system for implementing monetary policy when bank lending is subject to frictions. These frictions affect the spread between the interbank rate and the loan rate. We show how the width of the channel, the nature of random payment flows in the interbank market and the presence of frictions in the loan market affect the propagation of financial shocks that originate either in the interbank market or in the loan market. We study the transmission mechanism of two different financial shocks: 1) An increase in the volatility of the payment shock that banks face once the interbank market has closed and 2) An exogenous termination of loan contracts that directly affects the probability of continuation of credit relationships. Both financial shocks are propagated through the interaction of the marginal value of having excess reserves as collateral relative to other bank assets, the real marginal cost of labor for all active firms and the reservation productivity that selects the mass of producing firms. Our results suggest that financial shocks produce a reallocation of bank assets towards excess reserves as well as intensive and extensive margin effects over employment. The aggregation of those effects produce deep and prolonged recessions that are associated to fluctuations in the endogenous component of total factor productivity that appears as an additional input in the aggregate production function of the economy. We show that this wedge depends on aggregate credit conditions and on the mass of producing firms.
Reserve requirements imposed against bank deposits, nominal interest payments on bank reserves (or on base money), and inflation can all be viewed as generating tax effects. Any analysis of optimal monetary policy in a steady-state equilibrium needs to consider the simultaneous choice of all the tax instruments controlled by the monetary authority. Such an analysis is carried out in this paper. It is shown that when the tax system is not indexed, the optimal nominal interest rate on the monetary authority's liabilities is likely to be zero. More importantly, any discussion of the payment of interest on reserves and currency must take into account the nature of the tax system and the rate of inflation in a nonindexed economy.
'%3e%3cpath fill='%23012169' d='M0 0v30h60V0z'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='6' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='4' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30' clip-path='url(%23b)'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='10' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='6' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
