Increases in government spending trigger substitution effects—both inter- and intra-temporal—and a wealth effect. The ultimate impacts on the economy hinge on current and expected monetary and fiscal ...policy behavior. Studies that impose active monetary policy and passive fiscal policy typically find that government consumption crowds out private consumption: higher future taxes create a strong negative wealth effect, while the active monetary response increases the real interest rate. This paper estimates Markov-switching policy rules for the United States and finds that monetary and fiscal policies fluctuate between active and passive behavior. When the estimated joint policy process is imposed on a conventional new Keynesian model, government spending generates positive consumption multipliers in some policy regimes and in simulated data in which all policy regimes are realized. The paper reports the model's predictions of the macroeconomic impacts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's implied path for government spending under alternative monetary–fiscal policy combinations.
Generalizing the Taylor Principle Davig, Troy; Leeper, Eric M.
The American economic review,
06/2007, Letnik:
97, Številka:
3
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The paper generalizes the Taylor principle-the proposition that central banks can stabilize the macroeconomy by raising their interest rate instrument more than one-for-one in response to higher ...inflation-to an environment in which reaction coefficients in the monetary policy rule change regime, evolving according to a Markov process. We derive a long-run Taylor principle which delivers unique bounded equilibria in two standard models. Policy can satisfy the Taylor principle in the long run, even while deviating from it substantially for brief periods or modestly for prolonged periods. Macroeconomic volatility can be higher in periods when the Taylor principle is not satisfied, not because of indeterminacy, but because monetary policy amplifies the impacts offundamental shocks. Regime change alters the qualitative and quantitative predictions of a conventional new Keynesian model, yielding fresh interpretations of existing empirical work.
Communicating Monetary Policy Rules Davig, Troy; Foerster, Andrew
European economic review,
January 2023, 2023-01-00, Letnik:
151
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Despite the ubiquity of inflation targeting, central banks communicate their frameworks in a variety of ways. No central bank explicitly expresses their conduct via a policy rule, which contrasts ...with models of policy. Central banks often connect theory with practice by publishing inflation forecasts that can, in principle, implicitly convey their reaction function. We return to this central idea to show how a central bank can achieve the gains of a rule-based policy without publicly stating a specific rule. The approach requires central banks to specify an inflation target, inflation tolerance bands, and provide economic projections. When inflation moves outside the band, inflation forecasts provide a time frame over which inflation will return to within the band. We show how this communication replicates and provides the same information as a rule-based policy. The communication strategy produces a natural benchmark for assessing central bank performance. We illustrate these features in a counterfactual monetary policy history of the United States.
Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a Markov-switching New Keynesian (MSNK) model that allows shifts in the monetary policy reaction coefficients and shock volatilities with U.S. data. We find that a ...more aggressive monetary policy regime was in place after the Volcker disinflation and before 1970 than during the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Our estimates also indicate that a low-volatility regime has been in place during most of the sample period after 1984. We connect the timing of the different regimes to a measure of inflation persistence.
Empirical evidence suggests the Phillips curve has flattened over the past few decades. To capture this feature of the data, I develop a framework where firms face a changing cost of price ...adjustment, which produces a Phillips curve with a slope coefficient that varies over time. To evaluate the implications for monetary policy, I construct the utility-based welfare criterion where the relative weight on output gap deviations changes synchronously with the slope of the Phillips curve. The systematic component of the rule that implements optimal policy is constant under discretion and commitment.
Uncertainty and Fiscal Cliffs DAVIG, TROY; FOERSTER, ANDREW
Journal of money, credit and banking,
October 2019, Letnik:
51, Številka:
7
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Large pending fiscal policy changes, such as in the United States in 2012 or in Japan with consumption taxes, often generate considerable uncertainty. “Fiscal cliff” episodes have several features: ...an announced possible future change, a skewed set of possible outcomes, the possibility that implementation may not actually occur, and a known resolution date. This paper develops a model capturing these features and studies their impact. Fiscal cliff uncertainty shocks have immediate impact, with a magnitude that depends on the probability of implementation, which generates economic volatility. The possibility of fiscal cliffs lowers economic activity even in periods of relative certainty.
Monetary and Fiscal Policy Switching CHUNG, HESS; DAVIG, TROY; LEEPER, ERIC M.
Journal of money, credit and banking,
June 2007, Letnik:
39, Številka:
4
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A growing body of evidence finds that policy reaction functions vary sub-stantially over different periods in the United States. This paper explores how moving to an environment in which monetary and ...fiscal regimes evolve according to a Markov process can change the impacts of policy shocks. In one regime monetary policy follows the Taylor principle and taxes rise strongly with debt; in another regime the Taylor principle fails to hold and taxes are exogenous. An example shows that a unique bounded non-Ricardian equilibrium exists in this environment. A computational model illustrates that because agents' decision rules embed the probability that policies will change in the future, monetary and tax shocks always produce wealth effects. When it is possible that fiscal policy will be unresponsive to debt at times, active monetary policy (like a Taylor rule) in one regime is not sufficient to insulate the economy against tax shocks in that regime and it can have the unintended consequence of amplifying and propagating the aggregate demand effects of tax shocks. The paper also considers the implications of policy switching for two empirical issues.
Farmer, Waggoner, and Zha (2009) (FWZ) show that a new Keynesian model with regime-switching monetary policy can support multiple solutions, appearing to contradict findings in Davig and Leeper ...(2007) (DL). The explanation is straightforward: FWZ derive solutions using a model that differs from the one to which the DL conditions apply. The FWZ solutions also require that the exogenous driving process is a function of private and policy parameters. This undermines the sharp distinctions among “deep parameters” typical of optimizing models and makes it difficult to ascribe economic interpretations to FWZ's additional solutions. (E12, E31, E43, E52)
This paper estimates regime-switching rules for monetary policy and tax policy over the post-war period in the United States and imposes the estimated policy process on a calibrated dynamic ...stochastic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities. Decision rules are locally unique and produce a rational expectations equilibrium in which (lump-sum) tax shocks always affect output and inflation. Tax non-neutralities in the model arise solely through the mechanism articulated by the fiscal theory of the price level. The paper quantifies that mechanism and finds it to be important in U.S. data, reconciling a popular class of monetary models with the evidence that tax shocks have substantial impacts. Because long-run policy behavior determines the qualitative nature of equilibrium, in a regime-switching environment more accurate qualitative inferences can be gleaned from full-sample information than by conditioning on policy regime.
We demonstrate the use of a Naïve Bayes model as a recession forecasting tool. The approach is closely connected with Markov-switching models and logistic regression, but also has important ...differences. In contrast to Markov-switching models, our Naïve Bayes model treats National Bureau of Economic Research business cycle turning points as data, rather than as hidden states to be inferred by the model. Although Naïve Bayes and logistic regression are asymptotically equivalent under certain distributional assumptions, the assumptions do not hold for business cycle data. As a result, Naïve Bayes has a larger asymptotic error rate, but converges to the error rate more quickly than logistic regression, resulting in more accurate recession forecasts with limited data. We show that Naïve Bayes outperforms competing models and the Survey of Professional Forecasters consistently for real-time recession forecasting up to 12 months in advance. These results hold under standard error measures, and also under a novel measure that varies the penalty on false signals, depending on when they occur within a cycle; for example, a false signal in the middle of an expansion is penalized more heavily than one that occurs close to a turning point.
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