We study the effect of a “leaning against the wind” monetary policy on asset price bubbles in a learning-to-forecast experiment, where prices are driven by the expectations of market participants. We find that a strong interest rate response is successful in preventing or deflating large price bubbles, while a weak response is not. Giving information about the interest rate changes and communicating the goal of the policy increases coordination of expectations and has a stabilizing effect. When the steady-state fundamental price is unknown and the interest rate rule is based on a proxy instead, the policy is less effective.
We investigate the behavior of shorts, considered sophisticated investors, before and after a set of Federal Reserve unconventional monetary policy announcements that spot bond markets did not fully anticipate. Short interest in agency securities systematically predicts bond price changes and other asset returns on the days of monetary announcements, particularly when growth or monetary news is released, indicating shorts correctly anticipate these surprises. Shorts also systematically rebalance after announcements in the direction of the announcement surprise when the announcement releases monetary or growth news, suggesting that shorts interpret these announcements to imply further yield changes in the same direction.
We examine the effect of corruption control on the volatility of economic growth using cross-country data that cover 131 economies worldwide for the period 1985–2018. To estimate the growth volatility model, we employ the system generalized method-of-moments estimator for dynamic panel data, which addresses potential endogeneity concerns using internal instruments. Our results show that corruption control significantly reduces growth volatility. This effect is robust to controlling for other measures of institutional quality. Moreover, we find some evidence for an indirect impact of corruption control on growth volatility through its role in reinforcing the volatility-dampening effect of financial development.
A survey on monetary policy communication among former members of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) reveals that enhancing credibility and trust is viewed as the most important objective of communication. Respondents judge communication with financial markets and experts as adequate, but see room for improvement in communicating with the public. The central bank objective is seen as the most important topic. Several respondents perceived the ECB's inflation aim of “below, but close to, 2%” that was in place at the time as ambiguous and in need of clarification. Overall, there is broad consensus on various communication issues.
The idea of 100% reserve requirements against demand deposits received a renewed impetus in recent years. In 1933, a group of University of Chicago economists, led by Frank Knight and Henry Simons, circulated two memoranda that proposed the scheme in what became known as the Chicago Plan of Banking Reform. That same idea had been proposed in 1926 by Frederick Soddy, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry. Soddy claimed precedence, a claim that caught on. I provide evidence showing that Knight, and probably Simons, conceived the idea of 100% reserves prior to the publication of Soddy's 1926 book.