Journal of Money Credit and Banking最新文献

This paper quantifies the roles played by income-level heterogeneity in the response of consumption to monetary policy shocks using U.S. household data. We show empirically that the response of consumption to expansionary monetary policy shocks is larger for high-income households than for low-income households. Empirical facts related to household characteristics suggest two channels: the presence of illiquid assets and heterogeneity in government transfers. Motivated by these empirical findings, we develop a model that incorporates illiquid assets and heterogeneity in government transfers to quantify the importance. Simulations based on the model indicate that the presence of illiquid assets, whose return increases in response to expansionary monetary shocks, is essential for explaining the heterogeneous consumption response.

In this paper, we provide a template for constructing monetary policy shocks for emerging economies. Our approach synthesizes financial data with a narrative analysis of central bank communication and related media coverage. We create a publicly available time-series database of policy dates and shocks for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Our shocks suggest that financial markets infer information about the future path of policy rate from RBI communication. Bond and stock markets react strongly to these monetary shocks but exhibit heterogeneity across governor regimes. Finally, we use the shocks as external instruments to identify the impact on macro-economic variables.

Market freezes are an interesting and theoretically challenging phenomenon —they are observed empirically, but cannot occur in standard models. This paper develops a formal theory of recurrent freezes emphasizing liquidity and self-fulfilling prophecies. While it is well understood how to get hot and cold spells, where prices and quantities fluctuate, we get asset market freezes and thaws where trade completely stops and starts. The simplest specification gets this using negative asset returns. Other specifications use information frictions or fixed costs. We also consider credit freezes, analyze the extent to which the decentralized nature of trade matters, and discuss policy implications.

This paper studies how adjustment along intensive and extensive margins of labor supply affects aggregate and disaggregate effects of monetary policy. To this end, I develop a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) economy where a nonlinear mapping from hours worked into labor services generates operative adjustment along intensive and extensive margins of labor supply. I find that monetary policy has significantly different effects on earnings inequality, depending on the extent to which margin is dominant, even if it generates similar aggregate responses.

Monetary policy can achieve equilibrium determinacy with considerably weak responses to inflation under price stickiness heterogeneity. The result holds in a sticky-price model with the constant elasticity-of-substitution aggregator and no trend inflation, and with a variable elasticity-of-substitution aggregator and historical trend inflation. The evidence in favor of the view that the U.S. economy was subject to self-fulfilling expectations-driven fluctuations in the pre-Volcker period and the systematic shift in monetary policy was crucial in subsequent stabilization of inflation appears much weaker through the lens of price stickiness heterogeneity than previously concluded in the literature under price stickiness homogeneity.

I assess how much of China's current account surplus can be explained by government policy of capital controls and foreign reserve accumulation during a period of rapid productivity growth. My model can generate an increase in China's current account surplus and foreign reserve holdings. I find that half of the peak in China's current account surplus can be explained by its capital control policies and half by its foreign reserve accumulation policies. Under an open capital account and floating exchange rate, China would have run a current account deficit of 6.5% of GDP.

This paper develops a model that jointly accounts for the missing disinflation in the wake of the Great Recession and the subsequently observed inflation-less recovery. The key mechanism works through heterogeneous expectations that may durably lose their anchoring to the central bank (CB)'s target and coordinate on particularly persistent below-target paths. The welfare cost associated with persistent low inflation may be reduced if the CB announces to the agents its target or its own inflation forecasts, as communication helps coordinate expectations. However, the CB may lose its credibility whenever its announcements become decoupled from actual inflation.

The paper shows, in a simple analytical framework, the existence of a deflationary bias in an economy with a low natural rate of interest, a zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on nominal interest rates and a discretionary Central Bank (CB) with an inflation mandate. The presence of the ZLB prevents the CB from offsetting negative shocks to inflation whereas it can offset positive shocks. This asymmetry pushes average inflation below the target which in turn drags down inflation expectations and reinforces the likelihood of hitting the ZLB. We show that this deflationary bias is particularly relevant for a CB with a symmetric dual mandate (i.e., minimizing deviations from inflation and employment), especially when facing demand shocks. But a strict inflation targeter cannot escape the suboptimal deflationary equilibrium either. The deflationary bias can be mitigated by targeting “shortfalls” instead of “deviations” from maximum employment and/or using flexible average inflation targeting. However, changing monetary policy strategy risks inflation expectations becoming entrenched above the target if the natural interest rate increases.

A better understanding of foreign exchange intervention (FXI) is often hindered by the lack of data. This paper provides a new data set of FXI covering a large number of countries since 2000 at monthly and quarterly frequencies. It includes published official data for about 40 countries as well as carefully constructed estimates for 122 countries. Estimates account for a wide range of central bank operations, including both spot and derivative transactions. These estimates improve upon traditional proxies based on changes in reserves, by adjusting for valuation changes, income flows, and changes in other foreign-currency balance sheet positions (both vis-à-vis residents and nonresidents)—the first estimates to do the latter to our knowledge—thus providing a more accurate measure of operations that change the central bank's foreign currency position. The data set also provides a classification of FXI operations into sterilized or not sterilized, a key dimension for economic analysis. Finally, the paper discusses the merits of the new estimates relative to traditional proxies, and presents stylized facts.

While banks are expected to draw down regulatory capital buffers in case of need during a crisis, we find that banks kept at a safe distance from regulatory buffers during the pandemic by procyclically reducing corporate lending. By exploiting granular credit register data, we show that banks with little capital headroom above their buffers reduced credit supply and that this behavior was amplified for banks that entered the crisis with larger undrawn credit lines. Affected firms were unable to fully rebalance their borrowing needs with other banks, although public guarantees mitigated banks' procyclical behavior and its real effect at the firm level. These findings raise concerns that the capital buffers introduced by Basel III may not be as countercyclical as intended.