Structural changes and the scope of inflation targeting in Korea

A small, open macroeconomic model that accounts for new financial accelerator effects (the effects of fluctuations in asset prices on bank credit and economic activity) is developed to evaluate various policy rules for inflation targeting. Given conditions in asset markets and the fragility of the financial sector, monetary policy responses can potentially amplify the financial accelerator effect. Simulations are used to compare various forms of inflation targeting using a model that emphasizes long-term inflation expectations, output changes, and the asset price channels. The simulations suggest that a successful outcome can be obtained by adhering to simple forward-looking simple rules, rather than backward-looking policy rules. Furthermore, inflation targeting can contribute to price as well as output stability by helping to keep the financial accelerator from being activated. Inflation targeting in emerging economies can provide an environment conducive to long-term capital market development.Monetary policy ; Inflation (Finance) - Korea

The financial labor supply accelerator

The financial labor supply accelerator links hours worked to minimum down payments for durable good purchases. When these constrain a household's debt, a persistent wage increase generates a liquidity shortage. This limits the income effect, so hours worked grow. The mechanism generates a positive comovement of labor supply and household debt, the strength of which depends positively on the minimum down-payment rate. Its potential macroeconomic importance comes from these labor supply fluctuations' procyclicality. This paper examines the comovement of hours worked and debt at the household level with PSID data before and after the financial deregulation of the early 1980s which reduced effective down payments and compares the evidence with results from model-generated data. The household-level data displays positive co-movement between hours worked and debt, which weakens after the financial reforms. An empirically realistic reduction of the model's required down payments generates a quantitatively similar weakening.Labor supply ; Wages ; Hours of labor - Mathematical models

Macroeconomic fluctuations and bank lending: evidence for Germany and the euro area

This paper analyzes how bank lending to the private nonbank sector responds dynamically to aggregate supply, demand and monetary policy shocks in Germany and the euro area. The results suggest that the dynamic responses in the two areas are broadly similar, although there are some differences in the relative contribution of the three shocks to the development of output, prices, interest rates and bank loans over time. In order to assess the role of bank lending in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks, we perform counterfactual simulations and analyze the dynamic responses of German loan sub-aggregates in order to test the distributional implications of potential credit market frictions. The results suggest that there is no evidence that loans amplify the transmission of macroeconomic fluctuations or that a "financial accelerator" via bank lending exists. --Business cycle fluctuations,bank lending,SVAR model,sign restrictions

Asymmetric Information, Financial Intermediation and the Monetary Transmission Mechanism: A Critical Review

Macroeconomic models currently used by policy makers generally assume that the workings of financial markets can be fully summarised by financial prices, because the Modigliani and Miller (1958) theorem holds. This paper argues that these models are too limited in describing how monetary policy (and other) shocks are transmitted to the economy and points to new directions. The models are too limited because they disregard an information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders and the importance of financial intermediaries not only for individual depositors but the economy as a whole. Incorporating financial market interactions into macroeconomic models will enhance the understanding of the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy and other shocks.Financial intermediaries; credit channel; monetary transmission mechanism; open economies

Evidence and Ideology in Macroeconomics: The Case of Investment Cycles

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic movements can be represented as low order, stochastic, dynamic processes with complex eigenvalues. Specifically, there is a fixed investment cycle of about 8 years and an inventory cycle of about 4 years. Maximum entropy spectral analysis was employed for the description of the cycles and continuous time econometrics for the explanatory models. The central explanatory mechanism is the second order accelerator, which incorporates adjustment costs both in relation to the capital stock and the rate of investment. By means of parametric resonance it was possible to show, both theoretically and empirically how cycles aggregate from the micro to the macro level. The same mathematical tool was also used to explain the international convergence of cycles. I argue that the theory of investment cycles was abandoned for ideological, not for evidential reasons. Methodological issues are also discussed

Thwarting systems and institutional dynamics or how to stabilize an unstable economy

In this contribution, it is shown that the ambivalence of institutional factors relatively to financial instability appears early in Minsky's first works, more precisely in the late fifties. The argument is developed in two main steps. First, on the basis of Minsky's analysis, I investigate the actual form that fluctuations analysis can take, explicitly including the institutional context that governs interactions between economic agents (I). I then look at the reasons why the stabilizing effects of a given institutional structure are not immutable. In order to remain effective, the institutional structure must, on the contrary, change endogenously in response to actions by private agents in the economy (II).Thwarting systemes, public deficits, central bank, financial innovation, Minsky, financial instability

Commercial property prices and bank performance

We seek to assess the effect of changes in commercial property prices on bank behaviour and performance in a range of industrialised economies, extending the existing micro literature on bank performance. The results suggest that, consistent with macro-level studies, commercial property prices have a marked impact on the behaviour and performance of individual banks. The signs found are consistent with a view that commercial property provides important forms of collateral that are perceived by banks to reduce risk and encourage lending. Such an impact exists even when conventional independent variables determining bank performance are included. Moreover, there is evidence that the magnitude of this impact is related to the size of the bank, the direction of commercial property price movements, and regional factors. The results have implications for risk managers, regulators and monetary policy makers. Notably, they underline the crucial relevance of commercial property prices as a macroprudential variable that warrants close scrutiny by the authorities. They also highlight the need to develop indicators of individual bank exposure to the property market that could help to calibrate the potential impact of changes in prices in stress tests

The Monetary Transmission Mechanism and the Evaluation of Monetary Policy Rules

This paper shows that different models of the monetary transmission mechanism lead to surprisingly similar choices about monetary policy rules. In particular, simple rules in which the interest rate reacts to inflation and real output seem to be robust to many different views about how monetary policy works. In models of small open economies—where the monetary transmission mechanism has a relatively strong exchange rate channel—the policy rule should also adjust to the exchange rate, but the gains from such exchange rate rules over rules that react only to inflation and output are small. The results suggest the need for more research on both the effect of exchange rate fluctuations and on policy rules that take account of exchange rates.

(WP 2016-02) The Limits of Central Bank Forward Guidance under Learning

Central bank forward guidance emerged as a pertinent tool for monetary policymakers since the Great Recession. Nevertheless, the effects of forward guidance remain unclear. This paper investigates the effectiveness of forward guidance while relaxing two standard macroeconomic assumptions: rational expectations and frictionless financial markets. Agents forecast future macroeconomic variables via either the rational expectations hypothesis or a more plausible theory of expectations formation called adaptive learning. A standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model is extended to include the financial accelerator mechanism. The results show that the addition of financial frictions amplifies the differences between rational expectations and adaptive learning to forward guidance. The macroeconomic variables are overall more responsive to forward guidance under rational expectations than under adaptive learning. During a period of economic crisis (e.g. a recession), output under rational expectations displays more favorable responses to forward guidance than under adaptive learning. These differences are exacerbated when compared to a similar analysis without financial frictions. Thus, monetary policymakers should consider the way in which expectations and credit frictions are modeled when examining the effects of forward guidance