Has More Independence Affected Bank of England's Reaction Function under Inflation Targeting? Lessons from Taylor Rule Empirics

This paper is an empirical investigation into the question of whether increased independence affects central bank behavior, in particular when monetary policy is already in an inflation targeting regime. We take advantage of the unique experience in that sense of the United Kingdom, where the Bank of England was granted operational independence from Her Majesty's Treasury only in May 1997, while inflation targeting had been implemented since October 1992. Our strategy is to estimate Taylor rules employing alternative specifications, econometric methods and variable proxies in search for robust results that survive most of those modifications. The key lesson we extract from UK quarterly data is that the Bank of England has responded to the output gap, and not at all to output growth, the more so after receiving operational independence, when the gap has been positive or close to zero and inflation credibly stabilized at target. We find no unambiguous evidence for any definite change in the Bank's reaction to inflation or in the degree of its interest rate smoothing. Our main import is to argue that both the asymmetry of the monetary policy reaction function across the cycle and the response to the output gap, not growth, are fully consistent with New Keynesian theory, especially under inflation targeting. Anchored inflation and economic expansion during the post-independence period thus complement greater autonomy in influencing the behavior of the Bank of England, yet clear separation of the individual contribution of each of these effects appears challenging given our short sample.

Does Instrument Independence Matter under the Constrained Discretionof an Inflation Targeting Goal? Lessons from UK Taylor Rule Empirics

We investigate whether increased independence affects central bank behavior when monetary policy is already in an inflation targeting regime. Taking advantage of the recent UK experience to identify such an exogenous change, we estimate Taylor rules via alternative methods, specifications and proxies. Our contribution is to detect two novel results: the Bank of England has responded to the output gap, not growth; and in a stronger way after receiving operational independence. Both findings are consistent with the Bank's mandate and New Keynesian monetary theory. Economic expansion and anchored inflation have thus complemented greater autonomy in influencing the Bank's policy feedbackasymmetry of monetary policy reaction function across the business cycle, response to output gap vs output growth, Taylor rules, operational independence, inflation targeting, United Kingdom

Exchange Rate Pass-Through on Prices in Macrodata: A Comparative Sensitivity Analysis

The paper compares exchange rate pass-through on aggregate prices in the US, Germany and Japan across a number of dimensions. Building on the empirical approaches in the recent literature, our contribution is to perform a thorough sensitivity analysis of alternative pass-through estimates. We find that the econometric method, data frequency and variable proxy employed matter for the precision of details, yet they often agree on some general trends. Thus, pass-through on import prices has declined in the 1990s relative to the 1980s, pass-through on export prices remains country-specific and pass-through on consumer prices is nowadays negligible in all three economies we consider.

Intergenerational Transmission of Inflation Aversion: Theory and Evidence

This paper studies the transmission of preferences in an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous mature agents characterized by different degrees of inflation aversion. We show how the dynamics of a society's degree of inflation aversion and the implied degree of central bank independence depend on the direction and speed of changes in the structure of the population's preferences, themselves a function of parent socialization efforts in response to observed inflation. We then construct a survey-based measure of inflation aversion and provide empirical support for our analytical and simulation results. Available cross-section evidence confirms that a nation's demographic structure, in particular variation in the share of retirees as a proxy for the more inflation-averse type, is a key determinant of inflation aversion, together with experience with past inflation and the resulting collective memory embodied in monetary institutions.intergenerational transmi ; evolving preferences ; inflation aversion ; central bank independence ; collective memory

Effects of the Exchange-Rate Regime on Trade under Monetary Uncertainty: The Role of Price Setting

In a baseline stochastic new open-economy macroeconomics (NOEM) model which parallels alternative invoicing conventions, namely consumer's currency pricing (CCP) vs. producer's currency pricing (PCP), we revisit the question whether the exchange-rate regime matters for trade. We show analytically that under full symmetry, only money shocks and separable but otherwise very general utility, it is irrelevant in affecting expected trade-to-output ratios. A peg-float comparison is nevertheless meaningful under PCP, although not CCP, in terms of volatility of national trade shares: by shutting down the pass-through and expenditure-switching channel, a peg then stabilizes equilibrium trade-to-GDP at its expected level.

When and How Much Does a Peg Increase Trade? The Role of Trade Costs and Import Demand Elasticity under Monetary Uncertainty

This paper extends stochastic research in new open-economy macroeconomics (NOEM) to study the effects of the exchange-rate regime on international trade in a more realistic, yet rigorous, analytical set-up. We essentially incorporate ”iceberg” costs, inducing home bias, into a unified framework which nests trade between countries that produce similar vs. different composite goods. Our main result is that given (some degree of) producer’s currency pricing with symmetry in structure and money shock distributions as the only source of uncertainty, a fixed exchange rate slightly reduces expected trade, measured as a share in GDP, relative to a float under elastic import demand, i.e. when countries’ output mixes are similar; inelastic import demand, possible under the same taste for diversity but far less substitutable national outputs arising in our model from differences in endowments although not in technological labor input requirements, reverses this conclusion. What a peg can achieve in any of these cases is trade stabilization (across states of nature). It would be greater for (symmetric) nations which (i) have a larger proportion of producer’s currency pricing in their trade, (ii) are exposed to higher monetary uncertainty, (iii) produce less substitutable output mixes and (iv) are located closer to one another or apply weaker bilateral trade restrictions

Exchange Rate Pass-Through on Prices in Macrodata: A Comparative Sensitivity Analysis

The paper compares exchange rate pass-through on aggregate prices in the US,Germany and Japan across a number of dimensions. Building on the empirical approaches in the recent literature, our contribution is to perform a thorough sensitivity analysis of alternative pass-through estimates. We find that the econometric method, data frequency and variable proxy employed matter for the precision of details, yet they often agree on some general trends. Thus, pass-through on import prices has declined in the 1990s relative to the 1980s, pass-through on export prices remains country-specific and pass-through on consumer prices is nowadays negligible in all three economies we consider