Journal of Money Credit and Banking最新文献

We analyze differences in consumption and wealth in an estimated New Keynesian model with rational and boundedly rational households. Shocks are shown to cause consumption and wealth heterogeneity due to the “rationality bias” of boundedly rational households. This bias can be decomposed into three components, which, for certain specifications of monetary policy, can exactly offset each other. Moreover, a more hawkish response to inflation leads to more volatility in consumption and wealth heterogeneity, which makes it optimal for the central bank to set lower coefficients in the Taylor rule than would have been the case under homogeneous rational expectations.

Housing is a long-lived asset whose value is sensitive to variations in expectations of long-run growth rates and interest rates. When a large fraction of households has leverage, housing price fluctuations cause large-scale redistribution and consumption volatility. We find that a practical way to insure the young and the poor from the housing market fluctuations is through a well-functioning rental market. In practice, homeownership subsidies keep the rental market small and the housing cycle affects aggregate consumption. Removing homeownership subsidies hurts old homeowners, while leverage limits hurt young homeowners.

This paper presents a new method to estimate the depreciation rate of durable goods using a combination of identified marginal and average spending shares. We apply our method to Chinese spending responses to disposable income changes induced by monetary policy in 2008–09. The marginal total spending response is 0.40. About 46% of this marginal spending response is due to durable goods. By combining this marginal spending share on durables with an average spending share of 14%, we estimate the annual depreciation rate of durables in China to be 0.17.

We estimate the effect of job loss on households’ bank account ownership using novel data: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)-sponsored biennial supplements to the Current Population Survey (CPS), linked to respondents’ work history in surrounding months constructed from the Basic Monthly CPS. Leveraging differences in the timing of unemployment spells across households, we show that job loss leads to a large decrease in the likelihood of having an account among the lower-income, renter households we study. Job loss also leads to increased use of other products and services that might substitute for a bank account, including prepaid cards, check cashing, and money orders.

This paper introduces a comprehensive database of macroprudential policies, which covers 134 countries from January 1990. Using a novel numerical indicator of the tightness of loan-to-value (LTV) regulations, we estimate the policy effects of incremental tightening in LTV limits, employing a propensity score–based method to address endogeneity concerns. The results point to economically significant and nonlinear effects on household credit, with a declining per-unit impact for larger tightening measures. The analysis indicates that policy leakage effects could be a factor behind the nonlinear effects. We finally find that the side effects of macroprudential policies on consumption and output are relatively small.

A dual holder simultaneously owns (private) debt and equity in the same firm. Private debt has a tax advantage, a positive cashflow, which incentivizes its use. This cashflow leads to a lower net cost of debt, which again reduces default risk as well as the cost of external debt. The usual trade-off between tax benefits and bankruptcy costs is altered. Debt priority affects both financing and default decisions. We find that an enterprise-value maximizing firm should issue senior, external debt and junior, private debt, rather than debt with pari-passu priority. Our analysis further highlights that tax authorities can effectively curtail the tax-motivated use of private debt through straightforward measures.

While numerous studies in monetary economics explore inflation, interest rates, stock returns, and money velocity, a model seamlessly linking these interactions remains elusive. One crucial omission in this literature is idiosyncratic precautionary money demand, a prominent feature in the data. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a simple model where precautionary money demand arises from heterogeneous household liquidity needs. Despite its intricate heterogeneity, the model allows straightforward aggregation, enabling analysis of its implications for household portfolios composed of cash, government bonds, and equities. The empirical analysis spans the period 1959.I–2022.I. Notably, the model captures crucial time-series properties that models without the idiosyncratic element fail to achieve.

We evaluate and compare alternative interest rate rules, namely, average inflation targeting (AIT), price-level targeting (PLT), and traditional inflation targeting rules, in a standard New Keynesian model that features recurring, transient zero lower bound regimes. We use determinacy and expectational stability (E-stability) of equilibrium as the criteria for stabilization policy. We find that PLT policy, including nominal GDP targeting as a special case, most effectively promotes determinacy and E-stability among the policy frameworks, whereas standard inflation targeting rules are prone to indeterminacy. AIT can induce determinacy and E-stability effectively, provided the averaging window is sufficiently long.

In 2009, the Australian Government delivered approximately $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were randomly allocated over a 5-week period. Panel model estimates show that for the average household, there was no significant disbursement effect on nondurable consumption. Only for relatively young and low-income households, for example, at the bottom 10th percentile of each, was there a significant positive effect of the tax bonus payment on nondurable consumption. We argue the null findings on average could be due to macroeconomic and institutional differences leaving Australian households less constrained than their U.S. counterparts.