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Central banks in emerging and developing economies (EMDEs) have been modernizing their monetary policy frameworks, often moving toward inflation targeting (IT). However, questions regarding the strength of monetary policy transmission from interest rates to inflation and output have often stalled progress. We conduct a novel empirical analysis using Jordà’s (2005) approach for 40 EMDEs to shed a light on monetary transmission in these countries. We find that interest rate hikes reduce output growth and inflation, once we explicitly account for the behavior of the exchange rate. Having a modern monetary policy framework—adopting IT and independent and transparent central banks—matters more for monetary transmission than financial development.
This paper considers the role of country-level opacity (the lack of availability of information) in amplifying shocks emanating from financial centers. We provide a simple model where, in the presence of ambiguity (uncertainty about the probability distribution of returns), prices in emerging markets react more strongly to signals from the developed market, the more opaque the emerging market is. The second contribution is empirical evidence for bond and equity markets in line with this prediction. Increasing the availability of information about public policies, improving accounting standards, and enhancing legal frameworks can help reduce the unpleasant side effects of financial globalization.
Government support to banks through the provision of explicit or implicit guarantees affects the willingness of banks to take on risk by reducing market discipline or by increasing charter value. We use an international sample of bank data and government support to banks for the periods 2003-2004 and 2009-2010. We find that more government support is associated with more risk taking by banks, especially during the financial crisis (2009-10). We also find that restricting banks' range of activities ameliorates the moral hazard problem. We conclude that strengthening market discipline in the banking sector is needed to address this moral hazard problem.
An analysis of mutual-fund-level flow data into EM bond and equity markets confirms that different types of funds behave differently. Bond funds are more sensitive to global factors and engage more in return chasing than equity funds. Flows from retail, open-end, and offshore funds are more volatile. Global funds are more stable in their EM investments than “dedicated” EM funds. Differences in the stability of flows from ultimate investors play a key role in explaining these patterns. The changing mix of global investors over the past 15 year has probably made portfolio flows to EMs more sensitive to global financial conditions.
This paper reviews the trade-offs involved in the choice of the ECB’s monetary policy operational framework. As long as the ECB’s supply of reserves remains well in excess of the banks’ demand, the ECB will likely continue to employ a floor system for implementing the target interest rate in money markets. Once the supply of reserves declines and approaches the steep part of the reserves demand function, the ECB will face a choice between a corridor system and some variant of a floor system. There are distinct pros and cons associated with each option. A corridor would be consistent with a smaller ECB balance sheet size, encourage banks to manage their liquidity buffers more tightly, a...
We examine whether changes in the distribution of household inflation expectations contain information on future inflation. We first discuss recent shifts in micro data from the US, UK, Germany, and Canada. We then zoom in on the US to explore econometrically whether distributional characteristics help predict future inflation. We find that the shape of the distribution of household expectations does indeed help predict one-year-ahead CPI inflation. Variance and skewness of household expectations’ distributions add predictive power beyond and above the median, especially in periods of high inflation. Remarkably, qualitatively, these results hold when including market-based measures and moments of the distribution of professional forecasts.
When uncertain about inflation persistence, central banks are well-advised to adopt a robust strategy when setting interest rates. This robust approach, characterized by a "better safe than sorry" philosophy, entails incurring a modest cost to safeguard against a protracted period of deviating inflation. Applied to the post-pandemic period of exceptional uncertainty and elevated inflation, this strategy would have called for a tightening bias. Specifically, a high level of uncertainty surrounding wage, profit, and price dynamics requires a more front-loaded increase in interest rates compared to a baseline scenario which the policymaker fully understands how shocks to those variables are transmitted to inflation and output. This paper provides empirical evidence of such uncertainty and estimates a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model for the euro area to derive a robust interest rate path for the ECB which serves to illustrate the case for insuring against inflation turning out to have greater persistence.
We explore empirically how the time-varying allocation of credit across firms with heterogeneous credit quality matters for financial stability outcomes. Using firm-level data for 55 countries over 1991-2016, we show that the riskiness of credit allocation, captured by Greenwood and Hanson (2013)’s ISS indicator, helps predict downside risks to GDP growth and systemic banking crises, two to three years ahead. Our analysis indicates that the riskiness of credit allocation is both a measure of corporate vulnerability and of investor sentiment. Economic forecasters wrongly predict a positive association between the riskiness of credit allocation and future growth, suggesting a flawed expectations process.
This paper introduces a new comprehensive database of macroprudential policies, which combines information from various sources and covers 134 countries from January 1990 to December 2016. Using these data, we first confirm that loan-targeted instruments have a significant impact on household credit, and a milder, dampening effect on consumption. Next, we exploit novel numerical information on loan-to-value (LTV) limits using a propensity-score-based method to address endogeneity concerns. The results point to economically significant and nonlinear effects, with a declining impact for larger tightening measures. Moreover, the initial LTV level appears to matter; when LTV limits are already tight, the effects of additional tightening on credit is dampened while those on consumption are strengthened.