Showing papers on "Inflation published in 2004"

The Modern History of Exchange Rate Arrangements: A Reinterpretation

Abstract: We develop a novel system of reclassifying historical exchange rate regimes. One key difference between our study and previous classifications is that we employ monthly data on market-determined parallel exchange rates going back to 1946 for 153 countries. Our approach differs from the IMF official classification (which we show to be only a little better than random), it also differs radically from all previous attempts at historical reclassification. Our classification points to a rethinking of economic performance under alternative exchange rate regimes. Indeed, the breakup of Bretton Woods had less impact on exchange rate regimes than is popularly believed.

A New Measure of Monetary Shocks: Derivation and Implications

Abstract: This paper develops a measure of U. S. monetary policy shocks for the period 1969-1996 that is relatively free of endogenous and anticipatory movements. Quantitative and narrative records are used to infer the Federal Reserve's intentions for the federal funds rate around FOMC meetings. This series is regressed on the Federal Reserve's internal forecasts to derive a measure free of systematic responses to information about future developments. Estimates using the new measure indicate that policy has large, relatively rapid, and statistically significant effects on both output and inflation. The effects are substantially stronger and quicker than those obtained using conventional indicators.

Oil and the Macroeconomy Since the 1970s

Abstract: Economists have long been intrigued by empirical evidence that suggests that oil price shocks may be closely related to macroeconomic performance. This interest dates back to the 1970s. The 1970s were a period of growing dependence on imported oil, unprecedented disruptions in the global oil market and poor macroeconomic performance in the United States. Thus, it was natural to suspect a causal relationship from oil prices to U.S. macroeconomic aggregates. Since then, a large body of work has accumulated that purports to establish this link on theoretical grounds and to provide empirical evidence in its support. We do not attempt a comprehensive survey of this literature, but rather provide an idiosyncratic synthesis of what we view as the key issues in this debate and the insights gained over the last 30 years. The timing seems right for such an account. Although the experience of the 1970s continues to play an important role in discussions of the link between oil and the macroeconomy, there have been a number of new “oil price shocks” since the 1970s, notably the 1986 collapse of oil prices and the 2000 boom in oil prices as well as the oil price increases associated with the 1990 –1991 Gulf war and the 2003 Iraq war. Given this richer case history, we are arguably in a better position than two decades ago to distinguish the idiosyncratic features of each oil crisis from the systematic effects. Increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions, periods of excessive inflation, reduced productivity and lower economic growth. In this paper, we review the arguments supporting such views. First, we highlight some of the conceptual difficulties in assigning a central role to oil price shocks in explaining

The Macroeconomy and the Yield Curve: A Dynamic Latent Factor Approach

Abstract: We estimate a model that summarizes the yield curve using latent factors (specifically, level, slope, and curvature) and also includes observable macroeconomic variables (specifically, real activity, inflation, and the monetary policy instrument) Our goal is to provide a characterization of the dynamic interactions between the macroeconomy and the yield curve We find strong evidence of the effects of macro variables on future movements in the yield curve and evidence for a reverse influence as well We also relate our results to the expectations hypothesis

A macro-finance model of the term structure, monetary policy and the economy*

Abstract: This paper develops and estimates a macro-finance model that combines a canonical affine no-arbitrage finance specification of the term structure with standard macroeconomic aggregate relationships for output and inflation. From this new empirical formulation, we obtain several interesting results: (1) the latent term structure factors from finance no-arbitrage models appear to have important macroeconomic and monetary policy underpinnings, (2) there is no evidence of monetary policy inertia or a slow partial adjustment of the policy interest rate by the Federal Reserve, and (3) both forward-looking and backward-looking elements play important roles in macroeconomic dynamics.

What drives housing price dynamics: cross-country evidence

Abstract: House prices generally depend on inflation, the yield curve and bank credit, but national differences in the mortgage markets also matter. House prices are more sensitive to short-term rates where floating rate mortgages are more widely used and more aggressive lending practices are associated with stronger feedback from prices to bank credit.

The Macroeconomic Effects of Inflation Targeting

Abstract: We find evidence that inflation targeting (IT) plays a role in anchoring long-run inflation expectations and in reducing the intrinsic persistence of inflation. Over the period since 1994, private-sector long-run inflation forecasts for the United States and the euro area exhibit significant correlation with lagged inflation, whereas this correlation is largely absent for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, indicating that these five inflation targeters have been quite successful in delinking expectations from realized inflation. Furthermore, we show that the null hypothesis of a random walk in core CPI inflation can be clearly rejected for four of these five countries, but not for either the U.S. or the euro area. Finally, we provide some evidence concerning the initial effects of the adoption of IT in a number of emerging-market economies.

Securing sustainable price stability : should credit come back from the wilderness?

Abstract: We argue that in order to achieve price stability in a sustainable way, central banks should consider paying greater attention to credit in their monetary policy strategies than is generally the case at present. Specifically, simply setting monetary policy so that a two-year inflation forecast is at the central bank's target may, on occasions, be less than optimal. In particular, the central bank may wish to deviate from such a strategy when developments in the financial system are exposing the macroeconomy to materially increased risk. Doing so calls for longer policy horizons together with an explicit incorporation into policy decisions of the balance of risks in the outlook. One important indicator that risk is building up is unusually sustained and rapid credit growth occurring alongside unusually sustained and large increases in asset prices ("financial imbalances"). Building on previous work, we show that empirical proxies for financial imbalances contain useful information about subsequent banking crises, output and inflation beyond traditional two-year policy horizons. On the basis of Taylor rule-type descriptions of policy, we also investigate the response of central banks to financial imbalances. We find evidence that, at least until recently, central banks generally either have not responded to imbalances systematically or, to the extent that they have, have done so asymmetrically, loosening policy further than normal in the face of their unwinding but not tightening it beyond normal as they build up.

Landscape, the scale of SUSY breaking, and inflation

Abstract: We argue that in the simplest version of the KKLT model, the maximal value of the Hubble constant during inflation cannot exceed the present value of the gravitino mass, Hm3/2. This may have important implications for string cosmology and for the scale of the SUSY breaking in this model. If one wants to have inflation on high energy scale, one must develop phenomenological models with an extremely large gravitino mass. On the other hand, if one insists that the gravitino mass should be O(1 TeV), one will need to develop models with a very low scale of inflation. We show, however, that one can avoid these restrictions in a more general class of KKLT models based on the racetrack superpotential with more than one exponent. In this case one can combine a small gravitino mass and low scale of SUSY breaking with the high energy scale of inflation.

Technology Shocks in the New Keynesian Model

Abstract: In the New Keynesian model, preference, cost-push, and monetary shocks all compete with the real-business-cycle model's technology shock in driving aggregate fluctuations. A version of this model, estimated via maximum likelihood, points to these other shocks as being more important for explaining the behavior of output, inflation, and interest rates in the postwar U.S. data. These results weaken the links between the current generation of New Keynesian models and the real-business-cycle models from which they were originally derived. They also suggest that Federal Reserve officials have often faced difficult trade-offs in conducting monetary policy.

Forecasting with a Bayesian DSGE Model: An Application to the Euro Area

Abstract: In monetary policy strategies geared towards maintaining price stability conditional and unconditional forecasts of inflation and output play an important role. This paper illustrates how modern sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, estimated using Bayesian techniques, can become an additional useful tool in the forecasting kit of central banks. First, we show that the forecasting performance of such models compares well with a-theoretical vector autoregressions. Moreover, we illustrate how the posterior distribution of the model can be used to calculate the complete distribution of the forecast, as well as various inflation risk measures that have been proposed in the literature. Finally, the structural nature of the model allows computing forecasts conditional on a policy path. It also allows examining the structural sources of the forecast errors and their implications for monetary policy. Using those tools, we analyse macroeconomic developments in the euro area since the start of EMU.

The Inflation-Targeting Debate

Abstract: Over the past fifteen years, a significant number of industrialized and middle-income countries have adopted inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policymaking. As the name suggests, in such inflation-targeting regimes, the central bank is responsible for achieving a publicly announced target for the inflation rate. While the objective of controlling inflation enjoys wide support among both academic experts and policymakers, and while the countries that have followed this model have generally experienced good macroeconomic outcomes, many important questions about inflation targeting remain. In "Inflation Targeting, " a distinguished group of contributors explores the many underexamined dimensions of inflation targeting its potential, its successes, and its limitations from both a theoretical and an empirical standpoint, and for both developed and emerging economies. The volume opens with a discussion of the optimal formulation of inflation-targeting policy and continues with a debate about the desirability of such a model for the United States. The concluding chapters discuss the special problems of inflation targeting in emerging markets, including the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary."

Does Inflation Targeting Matter

Abstract: This paper asks whether inflation targeting improves economic performance, as measured by the behavior of inflation, output, and interest rates. We compare 7 OECD countries that adopted inflation targeting in the early 1990s to 13 that did not. After the early 1990s, performance improved along many dimensions for both targeting and nontargeting countries. In some cases, the targeters improved by more. However, these differences are explained by the fact that targeters performed worse than nontargeters before the early 1990s, and there is regression towards the mean. Once one controls for this, there is no evidence that inflation targeting improves performance.

Exchange Rates and Fundamentals

Abstract: We show analytically that in a rational expectations present value model, an asset price manifests near random walk behavior if fundamentals are I(1) and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one. We argue that this result helps explain the well known puzzle that fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation and interest rates provide little help in predicting changes in floating exchange rates. As well, we show that the data do exhibit a related link suggested by standard models - that the exchange rate helps predict these fundamentals. The implication is that exchange rates and fundamentals are linked in a way that is broadly consistent with asset pricing models of the exchange rate.

Money's Role in the Monetary Business Cycle

Abstract: A small, structural model of the monetary business cycle implies that real money balances enter into a correctly-specified, forward-looking IS curve if and only if they enter into a correctly-specified, forward-looking Phillips curve. The model also implies that empirical measures of real balances must be adjusted for shifts in money demand to accurately isolate and quantify the dynamic effects of money on output and inflation. Maximum likelihood estimates of the modelOs parameters take both these considerations into account, but still suggest that money plays a minimal role in the monetary business cycle.

Monetary policy alternatives at the zero bound: an empirical assessment

Abstract: The success over the years in reducing inflation and, consequently, the average level of nominal interest rates has increased the likelihood that the nominal policy interest rate may become constrained by the zero lower bound. When that happens, a central bank can no longer stimulate aggregate demand by further interest-rate reductions and must rely on \"non-standard\" policy alternatives. To assess the potential effectiveness of such policies, we analyze the behavior of selected asset prices over short periods surrounding central bank statements or other types of financial or economic news and estimate \"no-arbitrage\" models of the term structure for the United States and Japan. There is some evidence that central bank communications can help to shape public expectations of future policy actions and that asset purchases in large volume by a central bank would be able to affect the price or yield of the targeted asset.

Monetary Policy and Welfare in a Small Open Economy

Abstract: This paper characterizes welfare in a small open economy and derives the correspondingoptimal monetary policy rule. It shows that the utility-based loss function for a small openeconomy is a quadratic expression in domestic inflation, output gap and real exchange rate. Incontrast to previous works, this paper demonstrates that welfare in a small open economy,completely integrated with the rest of the world, is affected by exchange rate variability.Consequently, the optimal policy in a small open economy is not isomorphic to a closedeconomy and does not prescribe a pure floating exchange rate regime. Domestic inflationtargeting is optimal only under a particular parameterization, where the unique relevantdistortion in the economy is price stickiness. Under a general specification for preferencesand in the presence of inefficient steady state output, exchange rate targeting arises as part ofthe optimal monetary plan.

What drives housing price dynamics: cross-country evidence

Abstract: House prices generally depend on inflation, the yield curve and bank credit, but national differences in the mortgage markets also matter. House prices are more sensitive to short-term rates where floating rate mortgages are more widely used and more aggressive lending practices are associated with stronger feedback from prices to bank credit.

Exchange Rate Regime Durability and Performance in Developing Countries Versus Advanced Economies

Abstract: Drawing on new data and advances in exchange rate regimes' classification, we find that countries appear to benefit by having increasingly flexible exchange rate systems as they become richer and more financially developed. For developing countries with little exposure to international capital markets, pegs are notable for their durability and relatively low inflation. In contrast, for advanced economies, floats are distinctly more durable and also appear to be associated with higher growth. For emerging markets, our results parallel the Baxter and Stockman classic exchange regime neutrality result, though pegs are the least durable and expose countries to higher risk of crisis.

Forecasting euro area inflation: Does aggregating forecasts by HICP component improve forecast accuracy?

Abstract: Monitoring and forecasting price developments in the euro area is essential in the light of the second pillar of the ECB's monetary policy strategy. This study analyses whether the forecasting accuracy of forecasting aggregate euro area inflation can be improved by aggregating forecasts of subindices of the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as opposed to forecasting the aggregate HICP directly. The analysis includes univariate and multivariate linear time series models and distinguishes between different forecast horizons, HICP components and inflation measures. Various model selection procedures are employed to select models for the aggregate and the disaggregate components. The results indicate that aggregating forecasts by component does not necessarily help forecast year-on-year inflation twelve months ahead. JEL Classification: E31, E37, C53, C32

Euro Area Inflation Differentials

Abstract: We build a stylised 12-country model of the euro area and use it to analyse why differences in national inflation and growth rates arise within the European monetary union. We find that inflation persistence is a key potential explanatory factor. Other more frequently mentioned reasons, like country-specific shocks or differences in the monetary transmission mechanism across countries, count less. We also look at how a monetary policy geared to area-wide average inflation affects these differentials. Our model suggests that area-wide inflation stability and low inflation differentials are complementary.

The Macroeconomy and the Yield Curve: A Dynamic Latent Factor Approach

Abstract: We estimate a model that summarizes the yield curve using latent factors (specifically, level, slope, and curvature) and also includes observable macroeconomic variables (specifically, real activity, inflation, and the monetary policy instrument). Our goal is to provide a characterization of the dynamic interactions between the macroeconomy and the yield curve. We find strong evidence of the effects of macro variables on future movements in the yield curve and evidence for a reverse influence as well. We also relate our results to the expectations hypothesis.

The Reliability of Inflation Forecasts Based on Output Gap Estimates in Real Time

Abstract: A stable predictive relationship between inflation and the output gap, often referred to as a Phillips curve, provides the basis for countercyclical monetary policy in many models. In this paper, we evaluate the usefulness of alternative univariate and multivariate estimates of the output gap for predicting inflation. Many of the ex post output gap measures we examine appear to be quite useful for predicting inflation. However, forecasts using real-time estimates of the same measures do not perform nearly as well. The relative usefulness of real-time output gap estimates diminishes further when compared to simple bivariate forecasting models which use past inflation and output growth. Forecast performance also appears to be unstable over time, with models often performing differently over periods of high and low inflation. These results call into question the practical usefulness of the output gap concept for forecasting inflation.

Exchange Rate Pass-Through and the Inflation Environment in Industrialized Countries: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract: This paper investigates the question of whether a transition to a low-inflation environment, induced by a shift in monetary policy, results in a decline in the degree of pass-through of exchange rate movements to consumer prices.

Optimal monetary policy under commitment with a zero bound on nominal interest rates

Abstract: We compute the optimal non-linear interest rate policy under commitment for a forward-looking stochastic model with monopolistic competition and sticky prices when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. When the lower bound binds, the optimal policy is to reduce the real rate by generating inflation expectations. This is achieved by committing to increase future interest rates by less than what purely forward-looking policy would suggest. As a result, there is a ‘commitment bias’, i.e., average output and inflation turn out to be higher than their target values. Calibrating the model to the US economy we find that the quantitative importance of the average effects on output and inflation are negligible. Moreover, the empirical magnitude of US mark-up shocks is too small to entail zero nominal interest rates. Real rate shocks, however, plausibly lead to a binding lower bound under optimal policy, albeit relatively infrequently. Interestingly, the presence of binding real rate shocks alters the optimal policy response to (non-binding) mark-up shocks.