Working paper series / Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability
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215
Policymakers and researchers worry that the low-carbon transition may be inadvertently delayed by higher global interest rates. To examine whether green investment is especially sensitive to interest rate increases, we consider the effect of unanticipated monetary policy changes on the equity prices of green and brown European firms. We find that brown firms, measured in terms of carbon emission levels or intensities, are more negatively affected than green firms by tighter monetary policy. This heterogeneity is robust to different monetary policy surprises, emission measures, econometric methods, and sample periods, and it is not explained by other firm characteristics. This evidence suggests that higher interest rates may not skew investment away from a sustainable transition.
214
Corporate green pledges
(2024)
We identify corporate commitments for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions—green pledges—from news articles using a large language model. About 8% of publicly traded U.S. companies have made green pledges, and these companies tend to be larger and browner than those without pledges. Announcements of green pledges significantly and persistently raise stock prices, consistent with reductions in the carbon premium. Firms that make green pledges subsequently reduce their CO2 emissions. Our evidence suggests that green pledges are credible, have material new information for investors, and can reduce perceived transition risk.
213
Throughout its history, the Fed has operated with a muddled mandate that has not explicitly recognized price stability as the primary goal of monetary policy. The Fed’s success in maintaining price stability and fostering the good economic performance associated with it has depended on how it interpreted its mandate and implemented its policy strategy. In the 1970s and in the recent past, the Fed interpreted its mandate in an overambitious fashion, placing undue emphasis on the elusive goal of maximum employment. On both occasions, the Fed’s strategy proved insufficiently resilient, and high inflation followed. To improve its policy strategy the Fed ought to revert to earlier interpretations of its mandate that acknowledge the primacy of price stability as a policy guide.
210
We revisit the limited stock market participation puzzle leveraging a qualitative research approach that is commonly used in many social sciences, but much less so in finance or economics. We conduct in-depth interviews of stock market participants and non-participants in Germany, a high-income country with a low stock market participation rate. Differently from a survey using preset questions based on theory, we elicit views in an open-ended discussion, which starts with a general question about “money”, is not flagged as regarding stock market participation, and allows for probing and follow-up questions. Many of the factors proposed by the literature are mentioned by interviewees. However, non-investors perceive surprisingly high entry and participation costs due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the potential for selecting “good” stocks and avoiding “bad” ones and for market timing through frequent trading. Surprisingly, the investors we interview often share these views. However, they find a way to overcome these costs with the help of family, friends, or financial advisors they trust. While the insights from our qualitative interviews are based on a small number of interviewees, we find consistent evidence in a population-wide survey of investors and non-investors.
209
This paper investigates the implications of monetary policy rules during the surge and subsequent decline of inflation in the euro area and compares them to the interest rate decisions of the European Central Bank (ECB). It focuses on versions of the Taylor (1993) and Orphanides and Wieland (OW) (2013) rules. Rules that respond to recent outcomes of HICP Core or domestic inflation data called for raising interest rates in 2021 and well ahead of the rate increases implemented by the ECB. Thus, such simple outcome-based policy rules deserve more attention in the ECB’s monetary policy strategy. Interestingly, the rules support the recent shift of the ECB to policy easing. Yet, they add a note of caution by suggesting that policy rates should not decline as fast as apparently anticipated by traded derivative-based interest rate forecasts.
208
Helmut Schlesinger: Wegbereiter und Garant der deutschen Geld- und Stabilitätspolitik wird 100
(2024)
Am 4. September 2024 vollendet Professor Dr. Helmut Schlesinger sein 100. Lebensjahr. Von 1991 bis 1993 bekleidete er das Amt des Präsidenten der Deutschen Bundesbank. Zuvor war er in verschiedenen Positionen für die Bank tätig, unter anderem als langjähriger Vizepräsident (von 1980 bis 1991) sowie als Leiter der Hauptabteilung Volkswirtschaft und Statistik. Das Jubiläum bietet Anlass, sein Lebenswerk zu beschreiben und zu würdigen. Für ehemalige Mitarbeiter war Helmut Schlesinger ein großes Vorbild und eine Quelle des Ansporns in vielerlei Hinsicht. Insbesondere vier Bereiche seiner Tätigkeiten haben die Arbeit seiner Mitarbeiter maßgeblich geprägt: Erstens seine Fähigkeit, ökonomisches Denken als eine Synthese aus Analyse und Statistik zu begreifen, zu vermitteln und zu organisieren, zweitens sein Verdienst, eine Stabilitätskultur in leitenden Positionen mitgeschaffen und bewahrt zu haben, drittens sein ordnungspolitisches Credo zur Preisstabilität und zur Unabhängigkeit der Zentralbank sowie viertens seine klaren Vorstellungen zu den Bedingungen einer erfolgreichen Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion.
Im Folgenden soll ein Überblick über diese vier Schwerpunkte seiner Schaffensbilanz gegeben werden. In diesem Kontext ist insbesondere Schlesingers entscheidende Rolle bei der Schaffung der deutsch-deutschen Währungsunion 1990 sowie beim langjährigen Entstehungsprozess des Eurosystems und der Europäischen Zentralbank hervorzuheben. In der deutschen Bevölkerung, aber auch international hoch geachtet, wurde Helmut Schlesinger oft als die "Seele der Bundesbank" bezeichnet.Die Anforderungen, die er an jeden Einzelnen stellte, waren hoch. Er wurde von den Mitarbeitern sehr geschätzt, nicht zuletzt aufgrund seines großen Arbeitsethos und seiner unermüdlichen Schaffenskraft, die von Beständigkeit, Gradlinigkeit und Prinzipientreue geprägt waren.
207
I provide a solution method in the frequency domain for multivariate linear rational expectations models. The method works with the generalized Schur decomposition, providing a numerical implementation of the underlying analytic function solution methods suitable for standard DSGE estimation and analysis procedures. This approach generalizes the time-domain restriction of autoregressive-moving average exogenous driving forces to arbitrary covariance stationary processes. Applied to the standard New Keynesian model, I find that a Bayesian analysis favors a single parameter log harmonic function of the lag operator over the usual AR(1) assumption as it generates humped shaped autocorrelation patterns more consistent with the data.
206
We use a structural VAR model to study the German natural gas market and investigate the impact of the 2022 Russian supply stop on the German economy. Combining conventional and narrative sign restrictions, we find that gas supply and demand shocks have large and persistent price effects, while output effects tend to be moderate. The 2022 natural gas price spike was driven by adverse supply
shocks and positive storage demand shocks, as Germany filled its inventories before the winter. Counterfactual simulations of an embargo on natural gas imports from Russia indicate similar positive price and negative output effects compared to what we observe in the data.
205
This paper contributes a multivariate forecasting comparison between structural models and Machine-Learning-based tools. Specifically, a fully connected feed forward non-linear autoregressive neural network (ANN) is contrasted to a well established dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) using optimized priors as well as Greenbook and SPF forecasts. Model estimation and forecasting is based on an expanding window scheme using quarterly U.S. real-time data (1964Q2:2020Q3) for 8 macroeconomic time series (GDP, inflation, federal funds rate, spread, consumption, investment, wage, hours worked), allowing for up to 8 quarter ahead forecasts. The results show that the BVAR improves forecasts compared to the DSGE model, however there is evidence for an overall improvement of predictions when relying on ANN, or including them in a weighted average. Especially, ANN-based inflation forecasts improve other predictions by up to 50%. These results indicate that nonlinear data-driven ANNs are a useful method when it comes to macroeconomic forecasting.
204
Central bank intervention in the form of quantitative easing (QE) during times of low interest rates is a controversial topic. The author introduces a novel approach to study the effectiveness of such unconventional measures. Using U.S. data on six key financial and macroeconomic variables between 1990 and 2015, the economy is estimated by artificial neural networks. Historical counterfactual analyses show that real effects are less pronounced than yield effects.
Disentangling the effects of the individual asset purchase programs, impulse response functions provide evidence for QE being less effective the more the crisis is overcome. The peak effects of all QE interventions during the Financial Crisis only amounts to 1.3 pp for GDP growth and 0.6 pp for inflation respectively. Hence, the time as well as the volume of the interventions should be deliberated.
