Journal of Money Credit and Banking最新文献

While credit cards provide transaction services, they have never been included in measures of money supply. We derive the theory to measure the joint services of credit cards and money and propose two measures of their joint services: one based on microeconomic structural aggregation theory, providing an aggregated variable within the macroeconomy; the other a credit-card-extended aggregate, optimized as an indicator to capture the contributions of monetary and credit card as nowcasting indicator of nominal GDP. The inclusion of the new aggregates yields substantially more accurate nowcasts of nominal GDP, illustrating the usefulness of the information contained in credit cards.

At the zero lower bound (ZLB), expectations about the future path of monetary or fiscal policy are crucial. We model expectations formation under level-$�k$ thinking, a form of bounded rationality formalized by García-Schmidt and Woodford (2019) and Farhi and Werning (2019), consistent with experimental evidence. This process does not lead to a number of puzzling features from rational expectations models, such as the reversal puzzle, or implausible large fiscal multipliers. Optimal monetary policy at the ZLB under level-$�k$ thinking prescribes keeping the nominal rate lower for longer, but short-run macro-economic stabilization is less powerful compared to rational expectations.

We study the role of the size distribution of the banking sector for bailout policy and financial fragility in a model of financial intermediation with limited commitment and noisy sunspots. In particular, due to the different costs of mitigating depositors' losses, differences in financial fragility arise endogenously in the sense that the large banking market admits a higher degree of instability. Moreover, the desire to reduce differences in the amount of bailout funding across segments of the banking system leads the fiscal authority to collect less taxes ex-ante but ends up rendering the scope for run equilibria larger.

We evaluate the quantity–quality trade-off on the labor market by estimating an augmented matching function weighting the matches by quality measures. We use the approach to evaluate the German labor market reforms conducted between 2003 and 2005. Indeed, we find a significant quantity–quality trade-off. However, even after controlling for job quality, a good half of the positive effect of the reforms on matching efficiency remains.

We explore the finding that households often expect their financial position to remain unchanged compared to other alternatives. A generalized middle inflated ordered probit (GMIOP) model is used to account for the tendency of individuals to choose “neutral” responses when faced with opinion-based questions. Our analysis supports the use of a GMIOP model to account for this response pattern. Expectation indices based on competing discrete choice models are also explored. While financial optimism is significantly associated with increased consumption at both the intensive and extensive margin, indices which fail to take into account middle-inflation overestimate the impact of financial expectations.

We propose a novel theory of intrinsic inflation persistence by introducing trend inflation and Kimball (1995)-type aggregators of individual differentiated goods and labor in a model with staggered price- and wage-setting. Under nonzero trend inflation, the non-CES (constant elasticity of substitution) aggregator of goods and staggered price-setting give rise to a variable real marginal cost of goods aggregation, which becomes a driver of inflation. This marginal cost consists of an aggregate of the goods' relative prices, which depends on past inflation, thereby generating intrinsic inertia in inflation. Likewise, the non-CES aggregator of labor and staggered wage-setting lead to intrinsic inertia in wage inflation, which enhances the persistence of price inflation. With the theory we show that inflation exhibits a persistent, hump-shaped response to monetary policy shocks. We also demonstrate that lower trend inflation reduces inflation persistence and that a credible disinflation leads to a gradual decline in inflation and a fall in output.

Central banks normally accept debt of their own governments as collateral in liquidity operations without reservations. This gives rise to a valuable liquidity premium that reduces the cost of government finance. The ECB is an interesting exception in this respect. It relies on external assessments of the creditworthiness of its member states, such as credit ratings, to determine eligibility and the haircut it imposes on such debt. We show how such features in a central bank's collateral framework can give rise to cliff effects and multiple equilibria in bond yields and increase the vulnerability of governments to external shocks. This policy can potentially induce sovereign debt crises and defaults that would not otherwise occur. The success of the ECB's temporary suspension of these features of its collateral framework during the pandemic illustrates the practical relevance of this mechanism.

This paper compares the impact of government investment and government consumption on macroeconomic aggregates and inequality when the government deficit is money-financed while maintaining a fixed debt-money ratio. Real aggregate quantities are independent of the debt-money ratio, as is wealth inequality, but income inequality is impacted. We also investigate the impact of these two forms of government expenditure on the macroeconomic aggregates and distributions, illustrating their sharply contrasting effects on the tradeoffs they entail. While government investment is more effective in increasing the growth rate and moderating inflation, it has a more adverse effect on long-run income inequality.

I provide a microfounded theory for one of the oldest, but so far informal, explanations of price rigidity: the kinked-demand curve theory. Kinked-demand curves arise when some customers observe at no cost only the price at the store they are at. At the microlevel, the kinked-demand theory predicts that prices should be more likely to change if they have recently changed, and more flexible in markets where customers can more easily compare prices. At the macrolevel, it captures a part of the inflation/output trade-off that is not shifted by inflation expectations and therefore persists in the long run.