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53
I characterize optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a stochastic New Keynesian model when nominal interest rates may occasionally hit the zero lower bound. The benevolent policymaker controls the short-term nominal interest rate and the level of government spending. Under discretionary policy, accounting for fiscal stabilization policy eliminates to a large extent the welfare losses associated with the presence of the zero bound. Under commitment, the gains associated with the use of the fiscal policy tool remain modest, even though fiscal stabilization policy is part of the optimal policy mix.
50
This paper characterises optimal monetary policy in an economy with endogenous
firm entry, a cash-in-advance constraint and preset wages. Firms must make pro
fits to cover entry costs; thus the markup on goods prices is efficient. However, because leisure is not priced at a markup, the consumption-leisure tradeoff is distorted. Consequently, the real wage, hours and production are suboptimally low. Due to the labour requirement in entry, insufficient labour supply also implies that entry is too low. The paper shows that in the absence of
fiscal instruments such as labour income subsidies, the optimal monetary policy under sticky wages achieves higher welfare than under flexible wages. The policy maker uses the money supply instrument to raise the real wage - the cost of leisure - above its flexible-wage level, in response to expansionary shocks to productivity and entry costs. This raises labour supply, expanding production and
rm entry.
54
This paper outlines relatively easy to implement reforms for the supervision of transnational banking-groups in the E.U. that should not be primarily based on legal form but on the actual risk structures of the pertinent financial institutions. The proposal also aims at paying close attention to the economics of public administration and international relations in allocating competences among national and supranational supervisory bodies. Before detailing the own proposition, this paper looks into the relationship between sovereign debt and banking crises that drive regulatory reactions to the financial turmoil in the Euro area. These initiatives inter alia affirm effective prudential supervision as a pivotal element of crisis prevention. In order to arrive at a more informed idea, which determinants apart from a perceived appetite for regulatory arbitrage drive banks’ organizational choices, this paper scrutinizes the merits of either a branch or subsidiary structure for the cross-border business of financial institutions. In doing so, it also considers the policy-makers perspective. The analysis shows that no one size fits all organizational structure is available and concludes that banks’ choices should generally not be second-guessed, particularly because they are subject to (some) market discipline. The analysis proceeds with describing and evaluating how competences in prudential supervision are currently allocated among national and supranational supervisory authorities. In order to assess the findings the appraisal adopts insights form the economics of public administration and international relations. It argues that the supervisory architecture has to be more aligned with bureaucrats’ incentives and that inefficient requirements to cooperate and share information should be reduced. Contrary to a widespread perception, shifting responsibility to a supranational authority cannot solve all the problems identified. Resting on these foundations, the last part of this paper finally sketches an alternative solution that dwells on far-reaching mutual recognition of national supervisory regimes and allocates competences in line with supervisors’ incentives and the risk inherent in crossborder banking groups.
135
Abundant studies show that individuals often struggle and frequently fail to form a correct perception of how much they are worth in terms of income or net wealth, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The authors find that wealth misperception arises even in a frictionless environment. They show that this wealth misperception is related to low cognitive abilities and inattention, and that subjects who misperceive wealth have a greater tendency to borrow and spend out of gains. A standard optimal consumption choice model, enriched with a rational but inattentive agent à la Gabaix aligns the key experimental findings.
176
The authors estimate perceptions about the Fed's monetary policy rule from panel data on professional forecasts of interest rates and macroeconomic conditions. The perceived dependence of the federal funds rate on economic conditions is time-varying and cyclical: high during tightening episodes but low during easings. Forecasters update their perceptions about the policy rule in response to monetary policy actions, measured by high-frequency interest rate surprises, suggesting that forecasters have imperfect information about the rule. The perceived rule impacts asset prices crucial for monetary policy transmission, driving how interest rates respond to macroeconomic news and explaining term premia in long-term interest rates.
156
Can boundedly rational agents survive competition with fully rational agents? The authors develop a highly nonlinear heterogeneous agents model with rational forward looking versus boundedly rational backward looking agents and evolving market shares depending on their relative performance. Their novel numerical solution method detects equilibrium paths characterized by complex bubble and crash dynamics. Boundedly rational trend-extrapolators amplify small deviations from fundamentals, while rational agents anticipate market crashes after large bubbles and drive prices back close to fundamental value. Overall rational and non-rational beliefs co-evolve over time, with time-varying impact, and their interaction produces complex endogenous bubble and crashes, without any exogenous shocks.
96
Mehr als 18 Milliarden Euro hat die Commerzbank im Zuge der Finanzkrise in Form von staatlichen Garantien, Kapitalspritzen oder Einlagen erhalten. Auch die Hypo Real Estate, die WestLB, die SachsenLB und die IKB profitierten von Stützungsmaßnahmen. Die EU genehmigte diese und andere staatlichen Hilfsmaßnahmen. Grundsätzlich sind staatliche Stützungsmaßnahmen jedoch als wirtschaftlicher Vorteil zu werten und damit zunächst eine verbotene Beihilfe. In seinem Working Paper betrachtet Tuschl die rechtlichen Grundlagen des EU-Beihilferechts und zeigt die teilweise differierende Praxis der EU-Kommission auf.
164
Debt levels in the eurozone have reached new record highs. The member countries have tried to cushion the economic consequences of the corona pandemic with a massive increase in government spending. End of 2021 public debt in relation to GDP will approach 100% on average. There are various calls to abolish or soften the Maastricht rules of limiting sovereign debt. We see the risk of a new sovereign debt crisis in this decade if it is not possible to bring public debt down to an acceptable level. Our new fiscal rule would be suitable and appropriate for this purpose, because obviously the Maastricht criteria have failed. In contrast to the rigid 3% Maastricht-criterion, our rule is flexible and it addresses the main problem: excessively high public debt ratios. And it lowers the existing incentives for highly indebted governments to exert expansionary pressure on monetary policy. If obeyed strictly, our rule reinforces the snowball effect and reduces the excessively high debt ratios within a manageable period, even if nominal growth is weak. This is confirmed by simulations with different scenarios as well as with the hypothetical application of the new fiscal rule to eurozone economies from 2022 to 2026. Finally, we take up the recent proposal by ESM economists to increase the permissible debt ratio from 60 to 100% of GDP in the eurozone.
91
Our paper evaluates recent regulatory proposals mandating the deferral of bonus payments and claw-back clauses in the financial sector. We study a broadly applicable principal agent setting, in which the agent exerts effort for an immediately observable task (acquisition) and a task for which information is only gradually available over time (diligence). Optimal compensation contracts trade off the cost and benefit of delay resulting from agent impatience and the informational gain. Mandatory deferral may increase or decrease equilibrium diligence depending on the importance of the acquisition task. We provide concrete conditions on economic primitives that make mandatory deferral socially (un)desirable.
130
Distributed ledger technology especially in the form of publicly coordinated validation networks such as Ethereum and Bitcoin with their own monetary circles provide for a revealing litmus test for current financial regulatory schemes. The paper highlights the interrelation between distributed coordination and the emission of virtual currency to make sense of the function of the new monetary phenomenon. It then argues for the regulation of financial services on the ground of the technology to ensure integrity standards. In this respect, it is useful to gear the development of a regulatory scheme towards the existing financial regulatory principles. However, future measures of the regulators must take the distributed nature of the platforms into account by relying on a “regulated self-regulation” of the community. Finally, the article focuses on the shortcomings of the current EU regulatory regimes, especially the regulation frameworks regarding financial services, payment services and electronic money.
93
This paper looks into the specific influence that the European banking union will have on (future) bank client relationships. It shows that the intended regulatory influence on market conditions in principle serves as a powerful governance tool to achieve financial stability objectives.
From this vantage, it analyzes macro-prudential instruments with a particular view to mortgage lending markets – the latter have been critical in the emergence of many modern financial crises. In gauging the impact of the new European supervisory framework, it finds that the ECB will lack influence on key macro-prudential tools to push through more rigid supervisory policies vis-à-vis forbearing national authorities.
Furthermore, this paper points out that the current design of the European bail-in tool supplies resolution authorities with undue discretion. This feature which also afflicts the SRM imperils the key policy objective to re-instill market discipline on banks’ debt financing operations. The latter is also called into question because the nested regulatory technique that aims at preventing bail-outs unintendedly opens additional maneuvering space for political decision makers.
133
We propose a simple modification of the time series filter by Hamilton (2018) that yields reliable and economically meaningful real-time output gap estimates. The original filter relies on 8-quarter-ahead forecast errors of a simple autoregression of log real GDP. While this approach yields a cyclical component of GDP that is hardly revised with new incoming data due to the one-sided filtering approach, it does not cover typical business cycle frequencies evenly, but short business cycles are muted and medium length business cycles are amplified. Further, the estimated trend is as volatile as GDP itself and can thus hardly be interpreted as potential GDP. A simple modification that is based on the mean of 4- to 12-quarter-ahead forecast errors shares the favorable real-time properties of the Hamilton filter, but leads to a much better coverage of typical business cycle frequencies and a smooth estimated trend. Based on output growth and inflation forecasts and a comparison to revised output gap estimates from policy institutions, we find that real-time output gaps based on the modified Hamilton filter are economically much more meaningful measures of the business cycle than those based on other simple statistical trend-cycle decomposition techniques such as the HP or the Bandpass filter.
38
158
Rising temperatures, falling ratings: the effect of climate change on sovereign creditworthiness
(2021)
How will a changing climate impact the creditworthiness of governments over the very long term? Financial markets need credible, digestible information on how climate change translates into material risks. To bridge the gap between climate science and real-world financial indicators, the authors simulate the effect of climate change on sovereign credit ratings for 108 countries, creating the world’s first climate-adjusted sovereign credit rating. The study offers a first methodological approach to extend the long-term rating to an ultra-long-term reality, aiming at long-term investors, but also regulators and rating agencies.
180
Optimal monetary policy studies typically rely on a single structural model and identification of model-specific rules that minimize the unconditional volatilities of inflation and real activity. In their proposed approach, the authors take a large set of structural models and look for the model-robust rules that minimize the volatilities at those frequencies that policymakers are most interested in stabilizing. Compared to the status quo approach, their results suggest that policymakers should be more restrained in their inflation responses when their aim is to stabilize inflation and output growth at specific frequencies. Additional caution is called for due to model uncertainty.
14
Schuldenanstieg und Haftungsausschluss im deutschen Föderalstaat : zur Rolle des Moral Hazard
(2007)
Einleitung: Die deutschen Staatsschulden sind in den letzten Jahrzehnten kontinuierlich gestiegen. Künftige Generationen werden zusätzlich aufgrund der demographischen Entwicklung durch die umlagenfinanzierten sozialen Sicherungssysteme belastet. Gerade auch der Anstieg der Verschuldung der Bundesländer war in den letzten Jahrzehnten spürbar. So betrug die Verschuldung aller deutschen Bundesländer zusammengenommen 1991 noch 168 Mrd. Euro, während Anfang 2007 die Verschuldung 483 Mrd. Euro betrug, was eine knappe Verdopplung der Schuldenquote der Länder (Verschuldung in Prozent des BIP) auf ca. 21 Prozent impliziert. In der aktuellen Diskussion um die Reform des deutschen Föderalismus besteht Einigkeit in der Diagnose des Problems. Die Entwicklung der Staatsschulden ist kritisch und darf sich so nicht fortsetzen. Uneinigkeit herrscht hingegen über die Ursache des Anstiegs. Ebenfalls wird um die beste Möglichkeit, diesen zu bremsen, gerungen. Verschiedene Autoren argumentieren, dass der Verschuldungsanstieg der deutschen Bundesländer vor allem auf den Moral Hazard Anreiz zurückzuführen ist. Der vorliegende Diskussionsbeitrag diskutiert dies als einen der möglichen Gründe des Schuldenanstiegs. Hierzu wird zunächst das Konzept kurz eingeführt. Anschließend wird die bestehende empirische Evidenz für Deutschland diskutiert. Schließlich wird eine Bewertung und Einordnung in die aktuelle Debatte vorgenommen. Schlußbemerkungen: Im vorliegenden Diskussionsbeitrag wird das "Moral hazard" Problem als einer der möglichen Gründe für den beobachteten starken Anstieg der Verschuldung deutscher Bundesländer diskutiert. Es wurde gezeigt, dass die Finanzmärkte kaum auf die erheblichen Unterschiede in den fiskalischen Fundamentaldaten der Länder reagieren. Mit einer Fallstudie wurde außerdem verdeutlicht, dass das aktuelle Bundesverfassungsgerichtsurteil zu einer eventuellen Haushaltsnotlage von Berlin Berlin die Risikoeinschätzung der Märkte für deutsche Bundesländer nicht verändert hat. Alles in allem scheint es sinnvoll, über eine größere Beteiligung der Gläubiger an Risiken einzelner Länder nachzudenken. Dies dürfte aber den Schuldenanstieg nur bei bereits hoch verschuldeten Ländern begrenzen und möglicherweise einem Notlagenfall vorbeugen, nicht aber den grundsätzlichen "Defizit-Bias" der Finanzpolitik kompensieren. Insgesamt scheinen deswegen vorgelagerte Regeln notwendig, um den Anstieg der Verschuldung schon früh zu unterbinden und somit Belastungen zukünftiger Generationen zu reduzieren.
100
Schätzwerte mittelfristiger Gleichgewichtszinsen mit der Methode nach Laubach und Williams (2003) werden inzwischen vielfach in der Diskussion um die Geld- und Fiskalpolitik zitiert. Unter anderem wurden sie von Summers (2014a) als Evidenz für eine säkulare Stagnation angeführt und von Yellen (2015) zur Rechtfertigung der Nullzinspolitik verwendet. In diesem Papier nehmen wir eine umfangreiche Untersuchung und Sensitivitätsanalyse dieser Schätzwerte für die Vereinigten Staaten, Deutschland und den Euro-Raum vor. Aufgrund der hohen Unsicherheit und Sensitivität, die mit den Schätzwerten mittelfristiger Gleichgewichtszinsen mit der Laubach-Williams-Methode und ähnlichen Ansätzen verbunden ist, sollten diese Schätzungen nicht den Ausschlag für entscheidende Weichenstellungen in der Geld- und Fiskalpolitik geben.
182
This paper presents and compares Bernoulli iterative approaches for solving linear DSGE models. The methods are compared using nearly 100 different models from the Macroeconomic Model Data Base (MMB) and different parameterizations of the monetary policy rule in the medium-scale New Keynesian model of Smets and Wouters (2007) iteratively. I find that Bernoulli methods compare favorably in solving DSGE models to the QZ, providing similar accuracy as measured by the forward error of the solution at a comparable computation burden. The method can guarantee convergence to a particular, e.g., unique stable, solution and can be combined with other iterative methods, such as the Newton method, lending themselves especially to refining solutions.
174
The authors present and compare Newton-based methods from the applied mathematics literature for solving the matrix quadratic that underlies the recursive solution of linear DSGE models. The methods are compared using nearly 100 different models from the Macroeconomic Model Data Base (MMB) and different parameterizations of the monetary policy rule in the medium-scale New Keynesian model of Smets and Wouters (2007) iteratively. They find that Newton-based methods compare favorably in solving DSGE models, providing higher accuracy as measured by the forward error of the solution at a comparable computation burden. The methods, however, suffer from their inability to guarantee convergence to a particular, e.g. unique stable, solution, but their iterative procedures lend themselves to refining solutions either from different methods or parameterizations.
195
This paper applies structure preserving doubling methods to solve the matrix quadratic underlying the recursive solution of linear DSGE models. We present and compare two Structure-Preserving Doubling Algorithms ( SDAs) to other competing methods – the QZ method, a Newton algorithm, and an iterative Bernoulli approach – as well as the related cyclic and logarithmic reduction algorithms. Our comparison is completed using nearly 100 different models from the Macroeconomic Model Data Base (MMB) and different parameterizations of the monetary policy rule in the medium scale New Keynesian model of Smets and Wouters (2007) iteratively. We find that both SDAs perform very favorably relative to QZ, with generally more accurate solutions computed in less time. While we collect theoretical convergence results that promise quadratic convergence rates to a unique stable solution, the algorithms may fail to converge when there is a breakdown due to singularity of the coefficient matrices in the recursion. One of the proposed algorithms can overcome this problem by an appropriate (re)initialization. This SDA also performs particular well in refining solutions of different methods or from nearby parameterizations.
26
Inhalt: Prof. Dr. Helmut Siekmann : Stellungnahme für die öffentliche Anhörung des Haushalts- und Finanzausschusses des Landtags Nordrhein-Westfalen am 29. Oktober 2009 Gesetzentwurf der Landesregierung NRW : LANDTAG NORDRHEIN-WESTFALEN 14. Wahlperiode - Drucksache 14/9380 - 10.06.2009 Gesetz über die Feststellung eines zweiten Nachtrags zum Haushaltsplan des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen für das Haushaltsjahr 2009 und zur Änderung des Gesetzes zur Errichtung eines Fonds für eine Inanspruchnahme des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen aus der im Zusammenhang mit der Risikoabschirmung zugunsten der WestLB AG erklärten Garantie (Zweites Nachtragshaushaltsgesetz 2009) - Auszug Ergänzung der Landesregierung NRW zu dem Gesetzentwurf der Landesregierung - Drucksache 14/9380 (Zweites Nachtragshaushaltsgesetz 2009) - Drucksache 14/9510 – 01.07.2009 - Auszug Zweite Ergänzung der Landesregierung zu dem Gesetzentwurf der Landesregierung - Drucksachen 14/9380 und 14/9510 (1. Ergänzung) - Drucksache 14/9910 – 02.10.2009 - Auszug
19
Inhalt: Prof. Dr. Helmut Siekmann : Stellungnahme für die öffentliche Anhörung des Ausschusses für Wirtschaft, Mittelstand und Energie und des Haushalts- und Finanzausschusses des Landtags Nordrhein-Westfalen Keine Hilfe für Banken ohne einen neuen Ordnungsrahmen für die Finanzmärkte Stellungnahme 14/2328 Antrag der Fraktion Bündnis 90/Die Grünen : Keine Hilfe für Banken ohne einen neuen Ordnungsrahmen für Finanzmärkte Drucksache 14/7680 Fragenkatalog zur Anhörung von Sachverständigen am 04. Februar 2009 zum Antrag der Fraktion Bündnis90/Die Grünen Tableau Anhörung von Sachverständigen 57. Sitzung des Ausschusses für Wirtschaft, Mittelstand und Energie 85. Sitzung des Haushalts- und Finanzausschusses am Mittwoch, dem 4. Februar 2009
17
Inhalt: Prof. Dr. Helmut Siekmann : Stellungnahme für die öffentliche Anhörung des Haushaltsausschusses zu dem Gesetzentwurf der Fraktion der SPD und Bündnis 90/Die Grünen für ein Gesetz zur Änderung der Hessischen Landeshaushaltsordnung Gesetzentwurf der Fraktionen der SPD und Bündnis 90/Die Grünen für ein Gesetz zur Änderung der Hessischen Landeshaushaltsordnung (LHO) : Drucksache 17/265 Liste der Anzuhörenden im Haushaltsausschuss : am 17.09.2008 zur Drucksache 17/265
189
We present determinacy bounds on monetary policy in the sticky information model. We find that these bounds are more conservative here when the long run Phillips curve is vertical than in the standard Calvo sticky price New Keynesian model. Specifically, the Taylor principle is now necessary directly - no amount of output targeting can substitute for the monetary authority’s concern for inflation. These determinacy bounds are obtained by appealing to frequency domain techniques that themselves provide novel interpretations of the Phillips curve.
42
66
In this paper we investigate the comparative properties of empirically-estimated monetary models of the U.S. economy using a new database of models designed for such investigations. We focus on three representative models due to Christiano, Eichenbaum, Evans (2005), Smets and Wouters (2007) and Taylor (1993a). Although these models differ in terms of structure, estimation method, sample period, and data vintage, we find surprisingly similar economic impacts of unanticipated changes in the federal funds rate. However, optimized monetary policy rules differ across models and lack robustness. Model averaging offers an effective strategy for improving the robustness of policy rules.
11
Inhalt: Vorwort Grußwort Vizepräsident Professor Dr. Ingwer Ebsen Grußwort Professor Dr. Helmut Siekmann Dr. Guntram B. Wolff : „Moral hazard und bail-out im deutschen Föderalstaat“ Ernst Burgbacher :„Erwartungen an die Föderalismusreform II – mehr Wettbewerb und mehr Autonomie für den deutschen Bundesstaat“ Professor Dr. Joachim Wieland : „Rechtsregeln für den Umgang mit extremen Haushaltsnotlagen“ Professor Dr. Kai A. Konrad : „Vorschläge zur wirksamen Verschuldungsbegrenzung der Länder“
201
The Federal Reserve has been publishing federal funds rate prescriptions from Taylor rules in its Monetary Policy Report since 2017. The signals from the rules aligned with Fed action on many occasions, but in some cases the Fed opted for a different route. This paper reviews the implications of the rules during the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent inflation surge and derives projections for the future.
In 2020, the Fed took the negative prescribed rates, which were far below the effective lower bound on the nominal interest rate, as support for extensive and long-lasting quantitative easing. Yet, the calculations overstate the extent of the constraint, because they neglect the supply side effects of the pandemic.
The paper proposes a simple model-based adjustment to the resource gap used by the rules for 2020. In 2021, the rules clearly signaled the need for tightening because of the rise of inflation, yet the Fed waited until spring 2022 to raise the federal funds rate. With the decline of inflation over the course of 2023, the rules’ prescriptions have also come down. They fall below the actual federal funds rate target range in 2024. Several caveats concerning the projections of the interest rate prescriptions are discussed.
162
The authors present evidence of a new propagation mechanism for wealth inequality, based on differential responses, by education, to greater inequality at the start of economic life. The paper is motivated by a novel positive cross-country relationship between wealth inequality and perceptions of opportunity and fairness, which holds only for the more educated. Using unique administrative micro data and a quasi-field experiment of exogenous allocation of households, the authors find that exposure to a greater top 10% wealth share at the start of economic life in the country leads only the more educated placed in locations with above-median wealth mobility to attain higher wealth levels and position in the cohort-specific wealth distribution later on. Underlying this effect is greater participation in risky financial and real assets and in self-employment, with no evidence for a labor income, unemployment risk, or human capital investment channel. This differential response is robust to controlling for initial exposure to fixed or other time-varying local features, including income inequality, and consistent with self-fulfilling responses of the more educated to perceived opportunities, without evidence of imitation or learning from those at the top.
134
In the course of the crisis, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) has acted several times to support the EU Member States and banking systems in financial distress by purchasing debt instruments: Covered Bonds Programmes (CBP), Securities Market Programmes (SMP), Long Term Refinancing Operations (LTRO), and Targeted Long Term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO), followed by the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) and then the Extended Asset Purchase Programmes (EAPP) – colloquially labelled as Quantitative Easing (QE).
Initially, the support measures of the ESCB might have to be judged as monetary policy but the selectivity of OMT and – even more – SMP in conjunction with the transfer of risks to the ESCB speak against it.
124
What institutional arrangements for an independent central bank with a price stability mandate promote good policy outcomes when unconventional policies become necessary? Unconventional monetary policy poses challenges. The large scale asset purchases needed to counteract the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates have uncomfortable fiscal and distributional consequences and require central banks to assume greater risks on their balance sheets.
In his paper, Athanasios Orphanides draws lessons from the experience of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) since the late 1990s for the institutional design of independent central banks. He comes to the conclusion that lack of clarity on the precise definition of price stability, coupled with concerns about the legitimacy of large balance sheet expansions, hinders policy: It encourages the central bank to eschew the decisive quantitative easing needed to reflate the economy and instead to accommodate too-low inflation. The BoJ’s experience with the zero lower bound suggests important benefits from a clear definition of price stability as a symmetric 2% goal for inflation, which the Bank adopted in 2013.
1
Demographic change in industrialized nations has been a matter of common interest for some time. The financial implications of an ageing society are also increasingly discussed, particularly with regard to pension systems. The impact of this development on public finances is, however, only gradually being realized and the constitutional framework of public finances in Germany and the European Union just falls short of ignoring it entirely. This paper is a preliminary assessment of the burden of an ageing society under the fiscal law, specifically in respect of prospective entitlements to the public pension system. The first part analyses the provisions of the German constitution on finances (Finanzverfassungsrecht) to identify what rules, if any, exist addressing such (potential) expenditures, which lie in the immediate or very distant future. The second part of the paper analyses the fiscal requirements under European Union law. In the third and final part a few comments on the proposed national pact on stability and the recent moves to amend the German Federal Constitution are presented.
60
We examine both the degree and the structural stability of inflation persis tence at different quantiles of the conditional inflation distribution. Previous research focused exclusively on persistence at the conditional mean of the inflation rate. Economic theory, however, provides various reasons -for example downward wage rigidities or menu costs- to expect higher inflation persistence at the upper than at the lower tail of the conditional inflation distribution.
Based on post-war US data we indeed find slower mean reversion in response to positive than to negative shocks. We find robust evidence for a structural break in persistence at all quantiles of the inflation process in the early 1980s. Inflation persistence has decreased and become more homogeneous across quantiles. Persistence at the conditional mean became more informative about the degree of persistence across the entire conditional inflation distribution. While prior to the 1980s inflation was not mean reverting in response to large positive shocks, our evidence strongly suggests that since the end of the Volcker disinflation the unit root can be rejected at every quantile including the upper tail of the conditional inflation distribution.
51
How do changes in market structure affect the US business cycle? We estimate a monetary DSGE model with endogenous
rm/product entry and a translog expenditure function by Bayesian methods. The dynamics of net business formation allow us to identify the 'competition effect', by which desired price markups and inflation decrease when entry rises. We
find that a 1 percent increase in the number of competitors lowers desired markups by 0.18 percent. Most of the cyclical variability in inflation is driven by markup fluctuations due to sticky prices or exogenous shocks rather than endogenous changes in desired markups.
18
Hong Kong’s Linked Exchange Rate System (LERS) has been in operation for twenty-five years during which time many other fixed exchange rate systems have succumbed to shocks and/or speculative attacks. This fact alone suggests that the LERS is a robust system which enjoys a large measure of credibility in financial markets. This paper intends to investigate whether this is indeed the case, and whether it has been the case throughout its 25-year history. In particular we will use the tools of modern finance to extract information from financial asset prices about market expectations that are related to the credibility of the LERS. The main focus is on how market participants ‘judged’ the various changes made to the LERS, such as the ‘seven technical measures’ introduced in September 1998 and the ‘three refinements’ made in May 2005. These changes have been characterizes as making the system less discretionary over time, and we hypothesize that they have also made it more credible as revealed in the prices of exchange rate related asset prices. We also investigate the relationship between interest rates and exchange rates in the current system in light of modern models of target-zone exchange rate systems. We will examine whether the intramarginal intervention in November 2007 changed the dynamic properties of the exchange rate as suggested by such models.
159
This note argues that the European Central Bank should adjust its strategy in order to consider broader measures of inflation in its policy deliberations and communications. In particular, it points out that a broad measure of domestic goods and services price inflation such as the GDP deflator has increased along with the euro area recovery and the expansion of monetary policy since 2013, while HICP inflation has become more variable and, on average, has declined. Similarly, the cost of owner-occupied housing, which is excluded from the HICP, has risen during this period. Furthermore, it shows that optimal monetary policy at the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates aims to return inflation more slowly to the inflation target from below than in normal times because of uncertainty about the effects and potential side effects of quantitative easing.
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.
71
This note reviews the legal issues and concerns that are likely to play an important role in the ongoing deliberations of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany concerning the legality of ECB government bond purchases such as those conducted in the context of its earlier Securities Market Programme or potential future Outright Monetary Transactions.
155
High-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements are a standard method of measuring monetary policy shocks. However, some recent studies have documented puzzling effects of these shocks on private-sector forecasts of GDP, unemployment, or inflation that are opposite in sign to what standard macroeconomic models would predict. This evidence has been viewed as supportive of a „Fed information effect“ channel of monetary policy, whereby an FOMC tightening (easing) communicates that the economy is stronger (weaker) than the public had expected.
The authors show that these empirical results are also consistent with a „Fed response to news“ channel, in which incoming, publicly available economic news causes both the Fed to change monetary policy and the private sector to revise its forecasts. They provide substantial new evidence that distinguishes between these two channels and strongly favors the latter; for example, regressions that include the previously omitted public macroeconomic news, high-frequency stock market responses to Fed announcements, and a new survey that they conduct of individual Blue Chip forecasters all indicate that the Fed and private sector are simply responding to the same public news, and that there is little if any role for a „Fed information effect“.
179
Output gap revisions can be large even after many years. Real-time reliability tests might therefore be sensitive to the choice of the final output gap vintage that the real-time estimates are compared to. This is the case for the Federal Reserve’s output gap. When accounting for revisions in response to the global financial crisis in the final output gap, the improvement in real-time reliability since the mid-1990s is much smaller than found by Edge and Rudd (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2016, 98(4), 785-791). The negative bias of real-time estimates from the 1980s has disappeared, but the size of revisions continues to be as large as the output gap itself.
The authors systematically analyse how the realtime reliability assessment is affected through varying the final output gap vintage. They find that the largest changes are caused by output gap revisions after recessions. Economists revise their models in response to such events, leading to economically important revisions not only for the most recent years, but reaching back up to two decades. This might improve the understanding of past business cycle dynamics, but decreases the reliability of real-time output gaps ex post.
190
The forward guidance trap
(2023)
This paper examines the policy experience of the Fed, ECB and BOJ during and after the Covid-19 pandemic and draws lessons for monetary policy strategy and ist communication. All three central banks provided appropriate accommodation during the pandemic but two failed to unwind this accommodation in a timely manner. The Fed and ECB guided real interest rates to inappropriately negative levels as the economy recovered from the pandemic, fueling high inflation. The policy error can be traced to decisions regarding forward guidance on policy rates that delayed lift-off while the two central banks continued to expand their balance sheets. The Fed and the ECB fell into the forward guidance trap. This could have been avoided if policy were guided by a forward- looking rule that properly adjusted the nominal interest rate with the evolution of the inflation outlook.
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The ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court and its call for conducting and communicating proportionality assessments regarding monetary policy have been the subject of some controversy. However, it can also be understood as a way to strengthen the de-facto independence of the European Central Bank. The authors shows how a regular proportionality check could be integrated in the ECB’s strategy that is currently undergoing a systematic review. In particular, they propose to include quantitative benchmarks for policy rates and the central bank balance sheet. Deviations from such benchmarks can have benefits in terms of the intended path for inflation while involving costs in terms of risks and side effects that need to be balanced. Practical applications to the euro area are provided
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The recent sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone was characterized by a monetary policy, which has been constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates, and several countries, which faced high risk spreads on their sovereign bonds. How is the government spending multiplier affected by such an economic environment?While prominent results in the academic literature point to high government spending multipliers at the ZLB, higher public indebtedness is often associated with small government spending multipliers. I develop a DSGE model with leverage constrained banks that captures both features of this economic environment, the ZLB and fiscal stress. In this model, I analyze the effects of government spending shocks. I find that not only are multipliers large at the ZLB, the presence of fiscal stress can even increase their size. For longer durations of the ZLB,multipliers in this model can be considerably larger than one.
JEL Classification: E32, E 44, E62
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The recently observed disconnect between inflation and economic activity can be explained by the interplay between the zero lower bound (ZLB) and the costs of external financing. In normal times, credit spreads and the nominal interest rate balance out; factor costs dominate firms' marginal costs. When nominal rates are constrained, larger spreads can more than offset the effect of lower factor costs and induce only moderate inflation responses. The Phillips curve is hence flat at the ZLB, but features a positive slope in normal times and thus a hockey stick shape. Via this mechanism, forward guidance may induce deflationary effects.
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During the 1970s, industrial countries, including the US and continental Europa, experienced a combination of slow productivity growth and high unemplyoment. Subsequent research has shown that the standard model of unemployment actually gives counterfactual predictions. Motivated by the observation that the 1970s were also characterized by high and rising inflation, Tesfaselassie and Wolters examine the effect of growth on unemployment in the presence of nominal price rigidity.
The authors demonstrate that the effect of growth on unemployment may be positive or negative. Faster growth leads to lower unemployment if the rate of inflation is high enough. There is a threshold level of inflation below which faster growth leads to higher unemployment and above which faster growth leads to lower unemployment. The threshold level in turn depends on labor market characteristics, such as hiring efficiency, the job destruction rate, workers' relative bargaining power and the opportunity cost of work.