International Spillovers of Forward Guidance Shocks

International Spillovers of Forward Guidance Shocks
Author: Callum Jones
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 43
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484353552

After 2007, countries that cut their policy interest rates close to zero turned, among other policies, to forward guidance. We estimate a two-country model of the U.S. and Canada to quantify how unexpected changes in U.S. forward guidance affected Canada. Expansionary U.S. forward guidance shocks, like conventional policy shocks, are beggar-thy-neighbor and depress Canadian output, but by twice as much as conventional shocks. We find that the effect of U.S. forward guidance shocks on Canadian output, unlike conventional policy shocks, depends on the state of U.S. demand and can be five times smaller when U.S. demand is weak.

International Spillovers of Forward Guidance Shocks

International Spillovers of Forward Guidance Shocks
Author: Callum Jones
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 43
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484356616

After 2007, countries that cut their policy interest rates close to zero turned, among other policies, to forward guidance. We estimate a two-country model of the U.S. and Canada to quantify how unexpected changes in U.S. forward guidance affected Canada. Expansionary U.S. forward guidance shocks, like conventional policy shocks, are beggar-thy-neighbor and depress Canadian output, but by twice as much as conventional shocks. We find that the effect of U.S. forward guidance shocks on Canadian output, unlike conventional policy shocks, depends on the state of U.S. demand and can be five times smaller when U.S. demand is weak.

Household Leverage and the Recession

Household Leverage and the Recession
Author: Callum Jones
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 51
Release: 2018-08-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484374983

We evaluate and partially challenge the ‘household leverage’ view of the Great Recession. In the data, employment and consumption declined more in states where household debt declined more. We study a model where liquidity constraints amplify the response of consumption and employment to changes in debt. We estimate the model with Bayesian methods combining state and aggregate data. Changes in household credit limits explain 40 percent of the differential rise and fall of employment across states, but a small fraction of the aggregate employment decline in 2008-2010. Nevertheless, since household deleveraging was gradual, credit shocks greatly slowed the recovery.

Dominant Currency Paradigm: A New Model for Small Open Economies

Dominant Currency Paradigm: A New Model for Small Open Economies
Author: Camila Casas
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 62
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484330609

Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer’s currency or in local currency. We model instead a ‘dominant currency paradigm’ for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a dominant currency; pricing complementarities, and imported input use in production. Under this paradigm: (a) the terms-of-trade is stable; (b) dominant currency exchange rate pass-through into export and import prices is high regardless of destination or origin of goods; (c) exchange rate pass-through of non-dominant currencies is small; (d) expenditure switching occurs mostly via imports, driven by the dollar exchange rate while exports respond weakly, if at all; (e) strengthening of the dominant currency relative to non-dominant ones can negatively impact global trade; (f) optimal monetary policy targets deviations from the law of one price arising from dominant currency fluctuations, in addition to the inflation and output gap. Using data from Colombia we document strong support for the dominant currency paradigm.

Capitals of Capital

Capitals of Capital
Author: Youssef Cassis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2006-11-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

International financial centres have come to represent a major economic stake. Yet no historical study has been devoted to them. Professor Cassis, a leading financial historian, attempts to fill this gap by providing a comparative history of the most important centres that constitute the capitals of capital - New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore - from the beginning of the industrial age up to the present. The book has been conceived as a reflection on the dynamics of the rise and decline of international financial centres, setting them in their economic, political, social, and cultural context. While rooted in a strong and lively historical narrative, it draws on the concepts of financial economics in its analysis of events. It should widely appeal to business and finance professionals as well as to scholars and students in financial and economic history.

Central Bank Exit Strategies Domestic Transmission and International Spillovers

Central Bank Exit Strategies Domestic Transmission and International Spillovers
Author: Christopher J. Erceg
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 57
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

We study alternative approaches to the withdrawal of prolonged unconventional monetary stimulus (“exit strategies”) by central banks in large, advanced economies. We first show empirically that large-scale asset purchases affect the exchange rate and domestic and foreign term premiums more strongly than conventional short-term policy rate changes when normalizing by the effects on domestic GDP. We then build a two-country New Keynesian model that features segmented bond markets, cognitive discounting and strategic complementarities in price setting that is consistent with these findings. The model implies that quantitative easing (QE) is the only effective way to provide monetary stimulus when policy rates are persistently constrained by the effective lower bound, and that QE is likely to have larger domestic output effects than quantitative tightening (QT). We demonstrate that “exit strategies” by large advanced economies that rely heavily on QT can trigger sizeable inflation-output tradeoffs in foreign recipient economies through the exchange rate and term premium channels. We also show that these tradeoffs are likely to be stronger in emerging market economies, especially those with fixed exchange rates.

Central Banking in Theory and Practice

Central Banking in Theory and Practice
Author: Alan S. Blinder
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 116
Release: 1999-01-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262522601

Alan S. Blinder offers the dual perspective of a leading academic macroeconomist who served a stint as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—one who practiced what he had long preached and then returned to academia to write about it. He tells central bankers how they might better incorporate academic knowledge and thinking into the conduct of monetary policy, and he tells scholars how they might reorient their research to be more attuned to reality and thus more useful to central bankers. Based on the 1996 Lionel Robbins Lectures, this readable book deals succinctly, in a nontechnical manner, with a wide variety of issues in monetary policy. The book also includes the author's suggested solution to an age-old problem in monetary theory: what it means for monetary policy to be "neutral."

Negative Interest Rates

Negative Interest Rates
Author: Luís Brandão Marques
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2021-03-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1513570080

This paper focuses on negative interest rate policies and covers a broad range of its effects, with a detailed discussion of findings in the academic literature and of broader country experiences.

Global Trade and the Dollar

Global Trade and the Dollar
Author: Ms.Emine Boz
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 66
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 148432885X

We document that the U.S. dollar exchange rate drives global trade prices and volumes. Using a newly constructed data set of bilateral price and volume indices for more than 2,500 country pairs, we establish the following facts: 1) The dollar exchange rate quantitatively dominates the bilateral exchange rate in price pass-through and trade elasticity regressions. U.S. monetary policy induced dollar fluctuations have high pass-through into bilateral import prices. 2) Bilateral non-commodities terms of trade are essentially uncorrelated with bilateral exchange rates. 3) The strength of the U.S. dollar is a key predictor of rest-of-world aggregate trade volume and consumer/producer price inflation. A 1 percent U.S. dollar appreciation against all other currencies in the world predicts a 0.6–0.8 percent decline within a year in the volume of total trade between countries in the rest of the world, controlling for the global business cycle. 4) Using a novel Bayesian semiparametric hierarchical panel data model, we estimate that the importing country’s share of imports invoiced in dollars explains 15 percent of the variance of dollar pass-through/elasticity across country pairs. Our findings strongly support the dominant currency paradigm as opposed to the traditional Mundell-Fleming pricing paradigms.

Expectations' Anchoring and Inflation Persistence

Expectations' Anchoring and Inflation Persistence
Author: Mr.Rudolfs Bems
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 31
Release: 2018-12-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 148439223X

Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based inflation forecasts for 45 economies starting in 1989. We then study the response of consumer prices to terms-of-trade shocks for countries with flexible exchange rates. We find that these shocks have a significant and persistent effect on consumer price inflation when expectations are poorly anchored. By contrast, inflation reacts by less and returns quickly to its pre-shock level when expectations are strongly anchored.