Abstract
Can currency competition affect central banks’ control of interest rates and prices? Yes, it can. In a two-currency world with competing cash (material or digital), the growth rate of the ...cryptocurrency sets an upper bound on the nominal interest rate and the attainable inflation rate, if the government currency is to retain its role as medium of exchange. In any case, the government has full control of the inflation rate. With an interest-bearing digital currency, equilibria in which government currency loses medium-of-exchange property are ruled out. This benefit comes at the cost of relinquishing control over the inflation rate.
This paper considers the appropriate stabilization objectives for monetary policy in a microfounded model with staggered price-setting. Rotemberg and Woodford (1997) and Woodford (2002) have shown ...that under certain conditions, a local approximation to the expected utility of the representative household in a model of this kind is related inversely to the expected discounted value of a conventional quadratic loss function, in which each period's loss is a weighted average of squared deviations of inflation and an output gap measure from their optimal values (zero). However, those derivations rely on an assumption of the existence of an output or employment subsidy that offsets the distortion due to the market power of monopolistically competitive price-setters, so that the steady state under a zero-inflation policy involves an efficient level of output. Here we show how to dispense with this unappealing assumption, so that a valid linear-quadratic approximation to the optimal policy problem is possible even when the steady state is distorted to an arbitrary extent (allowing for tax distortions as well as market power), and when, as a consequence, it is necessary to take account of the effects of stabilization policy on the average level of output. We again obtain a welfare-theoretic loss function that involves both inflation and an appropriately defined output gap, though the degree of distortion of the steady state affects both the weights on the two stabilization objectives and the definition of the welfare-relevant output gap. In the light of these results, we reconsider the conditions under which complete price stability is optimal, and find that they are more restrictive in the case of a distorted steady state. We also consider the conditions under which pure randomization of monetary policy can be welfare-improving, and find that this is possible in the case of a sufficiently distorted steady state, though the parameter values required are probably not empirically realistic.
This paper studies whether the international monetary system can be affected by asymmetries in the cross-country positions in the international financial markets, i.e., the fact that some countries ...are large debtors while others are creditors. An important channel that is explored is the interaction between international risk sharing and the stabilization role of monetary policy in each country. The main finding is that the welfare costs of incomplete markets and the gains of deviating from a policy of price stability are increasing with the cross-country asymmetries in the initial net international positions and in particular they become nonnegligible when the persistence of the shocks increases (1% of a permanent shift in steady-state consumption, for the welfare costs of incomplete markets, and 0.2%, for the gains of deviating from a policy of price stability). When global imbalances become larger, optimal monetary policy requires an increase in the volatilities of the real returns on assets and in particular of the nominal interest rates, which should happen to be more correlated across countries.
This paper develops a theory in which the central bank can control the price level without fiscal backing. It is shown that the remittances policy and the balance sheet of the central bank are ...important elements to specify. A central bank that is appropriately capitalized can succeed in controlling prices by setting the interest rate on reserves, holding short-term assets, and rebating its income to the treasury from which it has to maintain financial independence.
Asymmetries in monetary policy Benigno, Pierpaolo; Rossi, Lorenza
European economic review,
November 2021, 2021-11-00, Letnik:
140
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Nonlinearities embedded in the standard New-Keynesian model show that a welfare-maximizing policymaker should behave in line with a contractionary bias, fearing more expansions in output and ...inflation rather than contractions. On the contrary, the aggregate-supply equation implies that any upward pressure coming from real marginal costs does not necessarily push up inflation. Once these two forces are combined in the optimal policy, an overall expansionary bias emerges. The nonlinearities of the AS equation combined with changes in volatility can be responsible for a flattening in the estimated linear Phillips curve.
•Private liquidity creation can result in liquidity crises and default on risky debt.•Government liquidity can supplement private liquidity and increase welfare.•Interventions in the form of asset ...purchases and deposit insurance are equivalent.•Regulating intermediaries by forcing them to invest in safe projects reduces welfare.
The joint supply of public and private liquidity is examined when financial intermediaries issue both riskless and risky debt and the economy is vulnerable to liquidity crises. Government interventions in the form of asset purchases and deposit insurance are equivalent (in the sense that they sustain the same equilibrium allocations), increase welfare, and, if fiscal capacity is sufficiently large, eliminate liquidity crises. In contrast, restricting intermediaries to investing in low-risk projects always eliminates liquidity crises but reduces welfare. Under some conditions, deposit insurance gives rise to an equilibrium in which intermediaries that issue insured debt (i.e., traditional banks) coexist with others that issue uninsured debt (i.e., shadow banks), despite the two being ex ante identical.
We propose an integrated treatment of the problems of optimal monetary and fiscal policy for an economy in which prices are sticky (so that the supply-side effects of tax changes are more complex ...than in standard fiscal analyses) and the only available sources of government revenue are distorting taxes (so that the fiscal consequences of monetary policy must be considered alongside the usual stabilization objectives). Our linear-quadratic approach allows us to nest both conventional analyses of optimal monetary stabilization policy and analyses of optimal tax-smoothing as special cases of our more general framework. We show how a linear-quadratic policy problem can be derived which yields a correct linear approximation to the optimal policy rules from the point of view of the maximization of expected discounted utility in a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model. Finally, in addition to characterizing the optimal dynamic responses to shocks under an optimal policy, we derive policy rules through which the monetary and fiscal authorities may implement the optimal equilibrium. These rules take the form of optimal targeting rules, specifying an appropriate target criterion for each authority.
We analyze a two-country economy with complete markets, featuring two national currencies as well as a global (crypto)currency. If the global currency is used in both countries, the national nominal ...interest rates must be equal and the exchange rate between the national currencies is a risk-adjusted martingale. Deviation from interest rate equality implies the risk of approaching the zero lower bound or the abandonment of the national currency. We call this result Crypto-Enforced Monetary Policy Synchronization (CEMPS). If the global currency is backed by interest-bearing assets, additional and tight restrictions on monetary policy arise. Thus, the classic Impossible Trinity becomes even less reconcilable.
This paper investigates how monetary policy should be conducted in a two-region general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and price stickiness. This framework delivers a simple welfare ...criterion based on the utility of the consumers that can be used to evaluate monetary policy in a currency area. If the two regions share the same degree of nominal rigidity, the terms of trade are completely insulated from monetary policy and the optimal outcome is obtained by targeting a weighted average of the regional inflation rates. These weights coincide with the economic sizes of the region. If the degrees of rigidity are different, the optimal plan implies a high degree of inertia in the inflation rate. But an inflation targeting policy in which higher weight is given to the inflation in the region with higher degree of nominal rigidity is nearly optimal.
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