Search

Part of the present inflation is caused by the breakdown of globalization, in particular supply chains, part is caused by the Corona Pandemic, in particular lockdowns, part is caused by the Ukrainian War, part is caused by European sanctions, and part - and not the smallest one - is caused by the European Central Bank's printing money by hook or by crook in the past and in the presence. This paper attributes inflation decisively to the overwhelming money creation by the European Central Bank.

Im Jahr 2020 publizierte das Bundesfinanzministerium den 5. Tragfähigkeitsbericht zur Staatsverschuldung in Deutschland für den Zeitraum bis 2060. Ausgangspunkt ist die zutreffende Erkenntnis, dass die von der Alterung der Gesellschaft abhängigen Kostensteigerungen auf lange Sicht über der Wachstumsrate des BIP liegen werden, wenn die derzeitigen Regelungen in den Sozialversicherungen beibehalten werden. In verschiedenen Varianten wird mit einer Fülle von Annahmen ein explosiver Schuldenanstieg errechnet, in einer Variante bis auf 185% des BIP im Jahre 2060. Die Methodik der Berichte beruht auf einer Definition von Schuldentragfähigkeit, die dem Indikator S2 der Europäischen Kommission folgt, welcher die Obergrenze für Staatsschulden von 60% (S1) ergänzen soll. Dieser Beitrag kritisiert den zugrunde liegenden Tragfähigkeitsbegriff und zeigt, dass das demografische Problem durch S2 systematisch überschätzt wird. Die Methodik vermengt demografische Kosten der Alterung mit Kosten, die durch axiomatische Annahmen für den Realzins und das Wirtschaftswachstum geschätzt werden. Sie legt eine dauerhaft restriktive Fiskalpolitik nahe sowie implizit eine stärkere Förderung kapitalbasierter Altersvorsorge. Sowohl die Konzeption von Schuldentragfähigkeit als auch der Begriff impliziter Staatsschulden werden in der Studie infrage gestellt und damit die Berechnungen des Tragfähigkeitsberichts relativiert. In 2020 the German Ministry of Finance published its 5th Debt Sustainability Report for the period 2020 until 2060. The methodology used is built on concepts originally established by the German Council of Economic Experts 2003 and the European Commission. The starting point is the notion that the annual increases of the costs of aging will be higher than the growth rate of GDP in the case that the present regulations for the pension system, health care and the care insurance remain unchanged. Under the no-policy-change premise an explosive increase of the debt-to-GDP ratio is forecast, up to 185% in 2060 in one of the variants. The methodology of the measurement of debt sustainability depends on the indicator S2 of the European Commission which is supposed to supplement the 60%-debt cap for the long term with an infinite time horizon. The S2 indicator is tied to the condition that interest rates on debt are above the growth rate of GDP. This report analyses the methodology and concludes that the costs of aging and the related debt increase are systematically overestimated. Following the S2-indicator suggests itself to permanently restrictive fiscal policy starting upfront and, furthermore, lends itself implicitly to a turn to more capital-funded old-age-provisioning than in the past. However, if the estimation of the costs of aging are disentangled from the debt dynamics which mainly stem for assumptions related to rising interest rates-growth differentials, a clearer cost assessment is possible. The true costs of aging are much smaller than explosive debt ratios suggest which are predominately a result of rising real interest rates. The assessment of "implicit" public debt due to aging requires a bundle of assumptions which are uncertain regarding the time horizon of 40 years. Such measured implicit costs cannot be aggregated with existing public debt. This report questions the term implicit public debt and the methodology used in the debt sustainability reports.

We examine the causal relationship between US monetary policy shocks, exchange rates and currency excess returns for a sample of eight advanced countries over the period 1980M1 to 2022M11. We find that the dynamics of the US dollar exchange rate is the main driver of currency excess returns. The exchange rate is significantly affected by US monetary policy shocks, where the persistence of this shock is important, as well as by an external shock. This external shock is strongly related to global risk aversion and the convenience yield that investors are willing to pay for holding US Dollar assets. A significant part of the response of excess currency returns is also expected, suggesting a violation of the UIP. Focusing only on the post-crisis period, the impact of both the external shock and the inflation targeting shock on exchange rates and currency excess returns disappears in the cross-section.

News drive expectations about the economy's future fundamentals. Climate change is big news: it will impact the economy profoundly but the effect will take some time to materialize in full. Climate-change expectations thus offer a unique opportunity to study the impact of news on the business cycle. We measure these expectations in a representative survey of US consumers. Respondents expect not much of an impact on GDP growth, but perceive a high probability of costly, rare disasters-suggesting they are salient of climate change. Furthermore, expectations vary systematically with socioeconomic characteristics, media consumption, various information treatments and over time. We calibrate a New Keynesian model with rare disasters to key results of the survey and find that shifts in climate change expectations operate like demand shocks and cause sizeable business cycle fluctuations.

Whenever inflation rears its head, the call soon comes to raise interest rates. The rationale is simple. Higher interest rates put a damper on the supply of money. And this monetary clamp slows inflation. It’s so intuitive that it must be true. Or is it? As the Reverend Brooke observes, it takes a person of true conviction to ignore apparent contradictions. As such, this post is designed to test your monetary faith. According to monetary orthodoxy, higher interest rates reduce inflation. Yet the evidence demonstrates that the opposite is true: higher interest rates are associated with higher inflation. With this evidence in mind, I invite you to read on. Put your monetary faith to the fire and see if it can survive.

The environment for investment in housing construction has changed drastically. Rising interest rates and construction costs are leading to a signifi cant decline in investment activity. This will exacerbate the shortage on the housing market, as refugees from Ukraine also require housing on a signifi cant scale. Clever solutions are needed to allow additional housing construction under the new conditions.

We study monetary policy in a New Keynesian model with a variable credit spread and scope for central bank asset purchases to matter. A novel financial and labor market interaction generates an endogenous cost-push channel in the Phillips curve and a credit wedge in the IS curve. The "divine coincidence" holds with the nominal short-term rate and central bank balance sheet available as policy tools. Credit spread-targeting balance sheet policy provides a determinate equilibrium with a fixed policy rate. This policy induces similar welfare losses relative to dual-instrument policy as inflation-targeting interest rate policy with a fixed balance sheet.

If you’re just tuning in, I’ve spent the last few months debunking some common misconceptions about inflation: Is inflation a uniform increase in prices? No. Inflation is wildly differential. Is inflation driven by an ‘over-heated’ economy? No. Inflation tends to come with economic stagnation. Do higher interest rates reduce inflation? No. Higher interest rates are associated with higher inflation. As expected, the last claim put mainstream economists into war mode. You see, the belief that interest rates down-regulate inflation has come to be sacred. So by scrutinizing this idea with evidence, I was effectively torching an effigy of the pope. (Novelist Cory Doctorow helped fan the flames by writing an incendiary essay about my research.) And so I spent a ‘fun’ week on Twitter being bombarded by econo-scorn. Now back to science. When I published ‘A Test of Monetary Faith’, I had more evidence in the pipelines — evidence that debunks the idea that interest rates down-regulate inflation. In this post, I’ll wade through the data. The take-home message is clear: when we look at the World Bank database, there is no evidence that higher interest rates down-regulate inflation. If anything, the evidence suggests that rate hikes make inflation worse. But before we get to the data, I’ll respond to some of the more cogent criticisms that economist hurled my way.

Corporate credit lines are drawn more heavily when funding markets are more stressed. This covariance elevates expected bank funding costs. We show that credit supply is dampened by the associated debtoverhang cost to bank shareholders. Until 2022, this impact was reduced by linking the interest paid on lines to credit-sensitive reference rates such as LIBOR. We show that transition to risk-free reference rates may exacerbate this friction. The adverse impact on credit supply is offset if drawdowns are expected to be left on deposit at the same bank, which happened at some of the largest banks during the COVID recession.

This paper examines the predictive ability of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates in the BRICS and G7 countries by relating each country’s monthly 3‑month Treasury bill rate to 10‑year government bond rates, from May 2003 to May 2018. The panel ARDL model, applying the mean group (MG), pooled mean group (PMG), and dynamic fixed effects (DFE) estimators, is employed to compare the short‑ and long‑run relationships in both groups of countries. The results show that the expectations hypothesis holds in both BRICS and G7 country groups. In the long run, the short‑term interest rate is able to predict the long-term interest rate in both the BRICS and G7 countries. Interest rates in BRICS indicate rapid adjustment back to the long‑run equilibrium, while the adjustment is sluggish in the G7 block. Based on the findings of the study, the sluggish adjustment to the equilibrium in the G7 gives the impression that the financial crisis had an impact on the term structure of interest rates as the G7 countries were directly affected by the crisis. W artykule dokonano analizy zdolności predykcyjnej hipotezy oczekiwań struktury terminowej stóp procentowych w krajach BRICS i G7, porównując miesięczną stopę oprocentowania trzymiesięcznych bonów skarbowych każdego kraju ze stopami oprocentowania 10‑letnich obligacji skarbowych w okresie od maja 2003 do maja 2018. Model panelowy ARDL, wykorzystujący estymatory Mean Group (MG), Pooled Mean Group (PMG) i estymatory modelu dynamicznego z efektami stałymi (DFE), posłużył do porównywania krótko‑ i długookresowych relacji w obu grupach krajów. Wyniki pokazują, że hipoteza oczekiwań jest prawdziwa zarówno dla grupy krajów BRICS, jak i G7. W dłuższej perspektywie krótkoterminowa stopa procentowa pozwala przewidzieć długoterminową stopę procentową zarówno w krajach BRICS, jak i G7. Stopy procentowe w krajach BRICS wskazują na szybką korektę i powrót do długookresowej równowagi, podczas gdy w bloku G7 korekta następuje powoli. Powolne dostosowywanie się do równowagi w krajach grupy G7 sugeruje, że kryzys finansowy wpłynął na strukturę terminową stóp procentowych gdyż kraje G7 zostały bezpośrednio dotknięte kryzysem.

The effects of social distancing measures on income distributions and aggregate variables are examined with an off-the-shelf heterogeneous-agent incomplete-market model. The model shows that social distancing measures, which limit households’ labor supply, can decrease the labor supply of low-income households who hold insufficient assets and need income the most given their borrowing constraints. Social distancing measures can therefore exacerbate income inequality by lowering the incomes of the poor. An equilibrium interest rate can fall when the social distancing shock is expected to be persistent because households save more to prepare for rising consumption volatility given the possibility of binding to the labor supply constraint over time. When the shock is expected to be transitory, in contrast, the interest rate can rise upon the arrival of the shock because constrained households choose to borrow more to smooth consumption given the expectation that the shock will fade away. The model also shows that social distancing shocks, which diminish households’ consumption demand, can decrease households’ incomes evenly for every income quantile, having a limited impact on income inequality.

A decrease in interest rate in traditional view of monetary policy transmission is linked to a lower cost of borrowing which eventually results into a greater spending in investment and a bigger GDP. However, a decrease in interest rate is also linked to a decrease in interest income which, in turn, affects the aggregate demand and total GDP. So far, no concerted effort has been made to investigate this positive inter-relation between interest income and GDP in the existing literature. Here in the first place we intuitively describe the inter-relation between interest income and output and then provide a micro-foundation of our intuitive reasoning in the context of a small endowment economy with finitely-lived identical households. Then we try to uncover the impact of nominal interest income on the macroeconomy using multiplier theory for a panel of some 04 (four) OECD countries. We define and calculate the corresponding multiplier values algebraically and then we empirically measure them using impulse response analysis under structural panel VAR framework. Large, consistent and positive values of the cumulative multipliers indicate a stable positive relationship between nominal interest income and output. Moreover, variance decomposition of GDP shows that a significant portion of the variance in GDP is attributed to interest income under VAR/VECM framework. Finally, we have shown how and where our analysis fits into the existing body of knowledge.

The transmission mechanism has been dominated by direct monetary measures since the crisis of 2008. While the indirect impacts of the unconventional monetary instruments have not been fully explored yet. Monetary policy and funding conditions determine pricing sentiments for bond, stock and currency markets, represented by the volatilities of their main indicators: stock market indices, exchange rates, and yield premia. Our theoretical model takes spillover effects into account when it determines the variables which are responsible for volatility: the activities of international financial institutions (like the ESM or the IMF) are represented by dummy variables, while the limited autonomy in the shadow of the ECB is captured through gravity-like approaches. Six EU member states outside the Eurozone and Switzerland were analysed between 2007 and 2019 with random effect panel regression models to identify the differences in the impact of spillover effects on capital market volatilities. The results obtained are considered to be useful in mapping the potential effects of continuing monetary easing in the near future.

This study examines the impact of trade and financial integration on structural transformation relying on data from 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the period 1985–2015. Results from our system generalized method of moments (GMM) show that, trade and financial integration significantly spur manufacturing and agricultural sector value additions. However, for the industrial sector, only financial integration robustly influences industrial growth with no effect on the service sector. Further evidence also suggests that trade and financial integration are complementary to each other and do not operate independently to influence structural transformation in SSA. Keywords: Trade integration, Financial integration, Sectoral value additions, Structural transformation

This study discusses various types of market-based instruments and tries to find which financial instrument is the best in predicting monetary policy expectations for different time horizons in Turkey. Consistent with the existing literature on this subject, we adopt an approach that comes from expectations theory of term structure of interest rates, which implies that short term forward interest rates reflect market expectations of short term rates in the future. By using this methodology, we treat upcoming monthly, 3-months, 6-months, 9-months, 12-months, and 24-months average of daily CBRT effective policy rates as alternative dependent variables; and market rates with corresponding maturities as independent variables. We aim to assess which market rate has the best predictive power for CBRT effective policy rates. We find that FX forward implied rates dominate all other instruments for 3, 6, 9, 12 and 24 months horizons while Borsa Istanbul overnight repo rate expectation from CBRT’s Survey of Expectations is the best for 1-month horizon in forecasting future policy rates. We also note that CBRT’s monetary policy predictability also changes with CBRT’s choice of monetary policy implementation. Keywords: Monetary policy, Policy rate expectations, Market-based measures of expectations, JEL classification: E43, E52, G12

Economic theory suggests that monetary policy can be used to stabilize an economy. However, the ability of monetary policy targets—interest rates and money supply—to stabilize an economy depends on their ability to achieve price stability. Using data from 1981 to 2018 and applying the vector error correction model, this paper seeks to determine how the changes in the inflation rate affect the ability of monetary policy tools to stabilize the Nigerian economy and stimulate investment. Empirical results suggest that the impact of the interest rates on investment depends on the level of the inflation rate. The size of the effect of interest rates on investment gets weaker as the inflation rate increases suggesting that monetary policy tools, such as the monetary policy rate (MPR), that directly change the interest rates are robust stabilization tools during periods of declining inflation rates but not relevant during periods of rising inflation rates. This is attributable to low bank lending rates. Additionally, the impact of the money supply target on investment does not depend on the level of the inflation rate. This suggests that monetary policy tools, such as open market operations, that directly change the money supply can be relevant stabilization tools during economic booms and recessions. As a result, the Central Bank of Nigeria should work to deepen the scale, capacity, and efficiency of its open market operations by ensuring that most of the people can participate with minimal transaction cost and by making different financial instruments available.

This paper studies the predictive power for recessions of the slope of the Swiss term structure using monthly data for 1974–2017. Dynamic probit models indicate that the term structure contains information useful for predicting recessions for horizons up to 19 months. Whether the economy is currently in recession or not is also useful for forecasting recessions. These relationships prove stable over the sample. Robustness tests indicate that the KOF business course indicator and some monetary aggregates contain different information from the term structure which can improve the in- and out-of-sample fit of the model.

Ghana’s economy is characterised by acute exchange rate volatility alongside persistent and high consumer inflation. This places the economy among the sub-Saharan African countries with the highest inflation over the years. Therefore, we explore in-sample and out-of-sample macro-volatility spillovers to determine the effectiveness of monetary policy and also ascertain the relevance of the exchange rate in Ghana’s interest rate setting at both time and multiscale domains. The study reveals scale-dependent interconnectedness among the macro-variables as their causal linkages broadly intensify at the longer time-scale. We find the real policy rate and the exchange rate to be net transmitters of shocks, while inflation and output gaps are net receivers of shocks from the system. Output gap, however, is the largest net receiver of shocks from the system. The empirical findings generally buttress the prerequisite to uphold exchange rate stability in order to inure general macroeconomic stability in Ghana. In addition, the extent of spillover dynamics from policy interest rate to and from the targeted macro-variables (particularly output gap and inflation) appears to be moderate even in the long run, surmising less effective monetary policy transmission in Ghana.

First, I update and wrap up the discussion on a monetary growth imperative, namely the argument that debt-money bearing interest triggers real GDP growth. I provide a detailed account of the different versions of the argument and show why none of them hold. In all cases, the argument is shown to be inconsistent in macro-accounting terms or to be at odds with the functioning of the monetary system. The general solution to the monetary growth imperative is that a sufficient share of wealth must be put back in circulation, for example via higher consumption out of wealth or taxation. Moreover, I show that a monetary growth imperative could equally well occur in an economy without debt-money or interest. However, the solution to the monetary growth imperative entails a sustainability paradox: more wealth put back in circulation allows to reach a stable full stationary state but may be environmentally unsustainable. I also highlight convergences between the critique of the monetary growth imperative and the monetary circuit literature. Second, I address the criticism that no net wealth accumulation is unrealistic. It requires to explain why there is accumulation in the first place. Building from post-Keynesian and institutionalist perspectives, I argue that we need to locate the analysis at the level of the definitional social relations of capitalism: market exchange and wage labour. Growth imperatives are emerging properties of these two social relations. I develop a critique of steadystate economics and underline the ontological difference between a zero-growth capitalism and a post-growth economy.

When the government issues long-term bonds, the optimal time-consistent fiscal and monetary policy is to consolidate debt in a liquidity trap by increasing taxes and by taming public spending. This prescription is at odds with large deficit-spending undertaken in the US during previous liquidity trap episodes. In this article, I show that accumulating debt turns optimal with long-term bonds and flexible wages if labor taxes are kept constant or if monetary policy is conducted non optimally. Moreover, even when labor taxes fluctuate and policy is fully coordinated, optimal deficit-spending in a liquidity trap emerges in a medium-scale model with sticky wages and rule-of-thumb consumers. In this case, debt consolidation occurs only after the nominal interest rate has lifted-off the zero lower bound, in accordance with conventional wisdom that a government should fix the roof while the sun is shining

Recent findings on the term structure of equity and bond yields pose serious challenges to existing models of equilibrium asset pricing. This paper presents a new equilibrium model of subjective expectations to explain the joint historical dynamics of equity and bond yields (and their yield spreads). The movements of equity and bond yields are driven mainly by subjective expectations of dividend and gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Yields on short-term dividend claims are more volatile because the expected short-term dividend growth mean-reverts to its less volatile long-run counterpart. The procyclical slope of equity yields is due to the countercyclical slope of dividend growth expectations. The correlation between equity returns/yields and nominal bond returns/yields switched from positive to negative after the late 1990s, owing mainly to a stronger correlation between expectations of real GDP growth and real dividend growth and only partially to procyclical inflation. Dividend strip returns are predictable, and the predictive power decreases with maturity as a result of predictable forecast errors and revisions. The model is also consistent with the data in generating persistent and volatile price-dividend ratios and excess return volatility., Les résultats de travaux récents sur la structure des taux de rendement des actions et des obligations posent des défis de taille aux modèles existants de détermination des prix d’équilibre des actifs. Cette étude propose un nouveau modèle d’équilibre basé sur les anticipations subjectives pour expliquer les dynamiques historiques conjointes des rendements boursiers et obligataires (et leurs écarts de rendement). Les mouvements de ces rendements sont principalement causés par des anticipations subjectives à l’égard de la croissance des dividendes et du produit intérieur brut (PIB). Dans le cas des droits aux dividendes à court terme, les rendements sont plus volatils parce que l’anticipation de croissance du dividende à court terme retourne à sa moyenne de long terme, moins volatile. La pente procyclique du rendement des actions est due à la pente contracyclique des anticipations de croissance des dividendes. La corrélation entre les rendements des actions et les rendements nominaux des obligations est passée du positif au négatif après la fin des années 1990, en raison essentiellement d’une corrélation plus forte entre la croissance du PIB réel et le taux de croissance réel des dividendes attendu, et en partie seulement à cause de l’inflation procyclique. Les rendements des strips de dividendes sont prévisibles, mais la capacité prédictive diminue avec l’échéance en raison des erreurs de prévision et révisions prévisibles. Le modèle concorde également avec les données car il produit des ratios cours-dividende persistants et volatils, et une volatilité excessive des rendements.

“Low for long” interest rate and other accommodative monetary policies increase risk-taking and medium- and long term macro-financial vulnerabilities. This paper aims to contribute to understanding how accommodative monetary policy have reshaped the risk perspective among the fixed-income market investors. I study the effects of People’s Bank of China’s monetary announcements on domestic corporate bond prices. Exploiting information embedded in high-frequency co-movement of financial assets prices and using a Bayesian structural vector autoregression, I deconstructed market surprises around the central bank’s announcements on Reserve Requirement Ratios into shocks to investors' beliefs about monetary policy and shocks to the beliefs about non-monetary fundamentals. Using a sample of 16,738 corporate bonds issued by 2,711 non-financial firms between 2010 and 2020, I find the monetary shocks have strong effects on bond pricing and can explain about one-fourth of the price movement around the releases. I further test the hypothesis of risk-taking, i.e., whether the effects differentiate across various credit risk groups. The result shows risky bonds outperform safer bonds following a monetary easing shock, i.e., a significant increase in appetite for risk after monetary policy becomes accommodative. More importantly, the asymmetry between the effects of monetary easing and tightening further confirms the role of accommodative monetary policy as a key driver in risk-taking. The findings raise implications for financial stability and macroprudential policy.

Central bankers are raising interest rates on the assumption that wage-push inflation may lead to stagflation. This is not the case. Although unemployment is low, the labor market is not 'tight'. On the contrary, we show that what matters for wage growth are the non-employment rate and the under-employment rate. Both are high and act as brakes on wage growth. By lowering already low levels of consumer confidence, higher interest rates are liable to exacerbate workers' inability to maintain their real wages by reducing labor demand still further. Furthermore, we argue inflationary pressures have been generated by short-term supply side problems, rather than excessive demand in the economy. Under these conditions, just as in the Great Recession we anticipate deflation in the near future, coupled with rising joblessness and recession.

This paper reviews the experience of the ECB with the two-tier system for excess reserve remuneration that exempted a portion of banks' excess liquidity (EL) holdings from the negative interest rate of the ECB's deposit facility. The two-tier system aimed to support the bank-based transmission of monetary policy, while preserving the positive effect of the ECB's negative interest rate policy on the accommodative stance of monetary policy. By signalling that the side effects of the negative interest rate policy could be mitigated, the two-tier system supported the ECB's forward guidance on key policy rates. Banks made swift use of the system by filling their allowances through money market transactions, reserves reallocation within their banking groups or by reducing security holdings. Although introducing the system increased turnover of reserves between banks, money market rates remained fully anchored to the deposit facility rate. The system effectively safeguarded the pass-through of monetary policy by providing significant relief to banks from their cost of holding EL and supporting banks' net interest rate margins and net worth. Factoring in the rates at which banks obtain EL shows that the net cost of holding EL for banks in 2021 remained substantially below the levels seen before the exemption was introduced. Ultimately, the system supported the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy, in particular the transmission of negative interest rates to lower lending rates.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, central banks started being confronted with severe challenges that led to an unprecedented policy response in terms of the size and variety of monetary policy measures. One such measure centred on central banks communicating to the public more explicitly their future policy actions in order to influence expectations. In the case of interest rates, as the standard policy rate approached the effective lower bound, major central banks began providing forward guidance (FG) on interest rates with the intention of lowering expectations of future short-term rates. While FG had been used in certain jurisdictions before the crisis, its prominence in the monetary policy toolkit grew substantially in the aftermath of the crisis. This occasional paper summarises the work carried-out by the Eurosystem Taskforce on the macroeconomic impact of rate forward guidance (FG) in an environment of large central bank balance sheets. The analysis presented covers the period up to February 2020 so the implications of the pandemic as well as the ECB's strategy review are beyond the scope of the Taskforce's mandate. The paper describes the analytical challenges associated with assessing rate FG on account of the relative novelty of these policies, the lack of well-established empirical results and the sensitivity of model predictions to the expectations formation process. To overcome and address these challenges, the Taskforce took stock of all the available infrastructure and analysis within in the Eurosystem, and where needed, developed structural and empirical models and approaches to assess the macroeconomic impact of rate FG in an environment of large central bank balance sheets.

This paper investigates the predictive power of the shadow rate for the inflation rate in countries with a zero lower bound (the US, the UK and Canada) and in those with negative rates (Japan, the Euro Area and Switzerland). Using shadow rates obtained from two different models (the Wu-Xia (2016) and the Krippner (2015a) ones) and for different lower bound parameters we compare the out-of-sample forecasting performance of an inflation model including a shadow rate interaction term with a benchmark one excluding it. Both specifications are estimated by OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) and includes a range of macroeconomic factors computed by means of principal component analysis. Both point and density forecasts of the inflation rate are evaluated. The models including the shadow rate interaction term are found to outperform the benchmark ones according to both sets of criteria except in countries operating an official inflation targeting regime. The presence or absence of a zero lower bound affects which type of shadow rate produces more accurate inflation forecasts.

We analyze retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a two-tier monetary system with bank deposit market power and externalities from liquidity transformation. Resource costs of liquidity provision determine the optimal monetary architecture and modified Friedman (1969) rules the optimal monetary policy. Optimal interest rates on reserves and CBDC differ. A calibration for the U.S. suggests a weak case for CBDC in the baseline but a much clearer case when too-big-to-fail banks, tax distortions or instrument restrictions are present. Depending on central bank choices CBDC raises U.S. bank funding costs by up to 1.5 percent of GDP.

Exploiting confidential data on individual German bank balance-sheets, I analyse what characterises a bank that opts to apply negative interest rates to corporate deposits. The results suggest that banks that are highly exposed to the negative interest rate policy (NIRP), i.e. funded by a larger share of household deposits, are more likely to apply negative corporate deposit rates. Furthermore, I examine whether banks adjusted their fee and commission strategy during the NIRP period and if they do what characterises those banks. My results show that banks adjusted their strategy in deposit business with households during the NIRP period. Compared with before, they generated higher net commission income on their outstanding household deposit holdings.

We propose a smooth shadow-rate version of the dynamic Nelson-Siegel (DNS) model to analyze the term structure of interest rates during the recent zero lower bound (ZLB) period. By relaxing the no-arbitrage restriction, our shadow-rate model becomes highly tractable with a closed-form yield curve expression. The model easily permits the implementation of readily available DNS extensions such as time-varying loadings, integration of macroeconomic variables and time-varying volatility. Using U.S. Treasury data, we provide clear evidence of a smooth tran- sition of the yields entering and leaving the ZLB state. Moreover, we show that the smooth shadow-rate DNS model dominates the baseline DNS model in terms of fitting and forecasting the yield curve, while being competitive with a shadow-rate affine term structure model.

High-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements are an important tool for identifying the effects of monetary policy on asset prices and the macroeconomy. However, some recent studies have questioned both the exogeneity and the relevance of these monetary policy surprises as instruments, especially for estimating the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy shocks. For example, monetary policy surprises are correlated with macroeconomic and financial data that is publicly available prior to the FOMC announcement. The authors address these concerns in two ways: First, they expand the set of monetary policy announcements to include speeches by the Fed Chair, which essentially doubles the number and importance of announcements in our dataset. Second, they explain the predictability of the monetary policy surprises in terms of the “Fed response to news” channel of Bauer and Swanson (2021) and account for it by orthogonalizing the surprises with respect to macroeconomic and financial data. Their subsequent reassessment of the effects of monetary policy yields two key results: First, estimates of the high-frequency effects on financial markets are largely unchanged. Second, estimates of the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy are substantially larger and more significant than what most previous empirical studies have found.

Do negative interest rates affect banks' cost efficiency? We exploit the unprecedented introduction of negative policy interest rates in the euro area to investigate whether banks make a virtue out of necessity in reacting to negative interest rates by adjusting their cost efficiency. We find that banks most affected by negative interest rates responded by enhancing their cost efficiency. We also show that improvements in cost efficiency are more pronounced for banks that are larger, less profitable, with lower asset quality and that operate in more competitive banking sectors. In addition, we document that enhancements in cost efficiency are statistically significant only when breaching the zero lower bound (ZLB), indicating that the pass-through of interest rates to cost efficiency is not effective when policy rates are positive. These findings hold important policy implications as they provide evidence on a beneficial second-order effect of negative interest rates on bank efficiency.

This paper uses novel news ticker data to evaluate the effect of sovereign risk on economic and financial outcomes. The use of intraday news enables me to derive policy events and respective timestamps that potentially alter investors' beliefs about a sovereign's willingness to service its debt and thereby sovereign risk. Following the high frequency identification literature, in the tradition of Kuttner (2001) and Guerkaynak et al. (2005), associated variation in sovereign risk is then obtained by capturing bond price movements within narrowly defined time windows around the event time. I conduct the outlined identification for Italy since its large bond market and its frequent coverage in the news render it a suitable candidate country. Using the identified shocks in an instrumental variable local projection setting yields a strong instrument and robust results in line with theoretical predictions. I document a dampening effect of sovereign risk on output. Also, borrowing costs for the private sector increase and inflation rises in response to higher sovereign risk.

What share of asset price movements is driven by news? We build a large, time-stamped event database covering scheduled macro news as well as unscheduled events. We find that news account for about 50% of all bond and stock price movements in the United States and euro area since 2002, suggesting that a much larger share of return variation can be traced back to observable news than previously thought. Moreover, we provide stylized facts about the type of news that matter most for asset prices, the persistence of news effects, and spillover effects between the US and euro area.

We estimate perceptions about the Fed's monetary policy rule from panel data on professional forecasts of interest rates and macroeconomic conditions. The perceived dependence of the federal funds rate on economic conditions is time-varying and cyclical: high during tightening episodes but low during easings. Forecasters update their perceptions about the policy rule in response to monetary policy actions, measured by high-frequency interest rate surprises, suggesting that forecasters have imperfect information about the rule. The perceived rule impacts asset prices crucial for monetary policy transmission, driving how interest rates respond to macroeconomic news and explaining term premia in long-term interest rates.

This paper sheds light on the functioning of internal capital markets by analysing money market transactions within the German cooperatives and savings banks finance groups. Using a unique dataset, the money market statistical reporting, this is the first paper to explicitly analyze the determinants of loan rates and volumes in internal capital markets. We find that the functioning of internal capital markets diverges substantially from the non-group interbank money market. Head institutes lend larger amounts at lower spreads to their affiliated banks than to banks outside their internal capital markets. Our findings also suggests that relationship lending is associated with lower spreads in the unsecured market in general but it plays only a minor role in internal capital markets. This finding indicates that counterparty credit risk and information asymmetries are less relevant within internal capital markets. We find an almost full immediate pass-through of the reduction of the deposit facility rate in 2019 to internal capital markets, but not to the rest of the interbank money market. The introduction of the two-tier system led to a slight transitory increase in rates and to a persistent increase in loan volumes within internal capital markets but not in the rest of the interbank money market.

This paper analyses persistence and non-linearities in quarterly and monthly US Treasury 10-year bond yields over the period 1962-2021 using two different fractional integration approaches including Chebyshev polynomials and Fourier functions respectively. The results for both quarterly and monthly data provide evidence of non-linear structures and mean reversion (i.e., of transitory effects of shocks) under the assumption of autocorrelated errors.

We provide a novel daily decomposition of the real exchange rate that exploits a direct link between bond and foreign exchange (FX) markets. Real exchange rate dynamics can be attributed to changes in the expected future level of the exchange rate; cross-country differentials of expected inflation, yields and bond term premia; and an FX risk premium. Through a variance decomposition exercise, we find that the FX risk premium is the dominant component. Monetary policies and macroeconomic news announcements largely move the real exchange through changes in the FX risk premium.

Since the beginning of 2022, monetary policy in the euro area has been gradually normalizing. As a result, bond yields of highly indebted countries such as Italy and Greece are rising more sharply than those of countries with less debt, such as Germany, a development referred to as bond market fragmentation. To ensure the coherent effectiveness of monetary policy on economic developments and, ultimately, price developments in all euro area Member States, the Governing Council of the European Central Bank announced the Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI) in July 2022. The TPI intends to make it possible to selectively purchase government bonds from countries whose interest rate increases are not considered to be justified by macroeconomic fundamentals, thus preventing a disorderly divergence in interest rate levels between countries. This Weekly Report analyzes the economic and legal aspects of this new monetary policy instrument. Estimates from the empirical model show that current yield spreads between government bonds of euro area member states cannot yet be justified as disorderly; rising yields can be explained by a worsening of macroeconomic fundamentals and stricter general risk assessments. Therefore, the requirements for activating the TPI have not yet been fulfilled. In addition, TPI raises concerns from a legal perspective.

We analyze optimal monetary policy and its implications for asset prices, when aggregate demand has inertia and responds to asset prices with a lag. If there is a negative output gap, the central bank optimally overshoots aggregate asset prices (asset prices are initially pushed above their steady-state levels consistent with current potential output). Overshooting leads to a temporary disconnect between the performance of financial markets and the real economy, but it accelerates the recovery. When there is a lower-bound constraint on the discount rate, overshooting becomes a concave and non-monotonic function of the output gap: the asset price boost is low for a deeply negative initial output gap, grows as the output gap improves over a range, and shrinks toward zero as the output gap improves further. This pattern also implies that good macroeconomic news is better news for asset prices when the output gap is more negative. Finally, we document that during the Covid-19 recovery, the policy-induced overshooting was large−sufficient to explain the high levels of stock and house prices in 2021.

We show that the liquidation value of collateral depends on who is pledging it. We employ transaction-level data on overnight repurchase agreements (repo) and loan-level credit registry data on corporate loans. We find that borrowers on the repo market pay a 2.6 basis points rate premium when their default risk is positively correlated with the risk of the collateral that they pledge. The premium in corporate loan markets amounts to 25 basis points. Our results imply that liquidation value contains a component at the borrower-collateral level, and that lenders monitor and price-in the interdependency between borrower and collateral risk.

The authors study the impact of dissent in the ECB‘s Governing Council on uncertainty surrounding households‘ inflation expectations. They conduct a randomized controlled trial using the Bundesbank Online Panel Households. Participants are provided with alternative information treatments concerning the vote in the Council, e.g. unanimity and dissent, and are asked to submit probabilistic inflation expectations. The results show that the vote is informative. Households revise their subjective inflation forecast after receiving information about the vote. Dissenting votes cause a wider individual distribution of future inflation. Hence, dissent increases households‘ uncertainty about inflation. This effect is statistically significant once the authors allow for the interaction between the treatments and individual characteristics of respondents. The results are robust with respect to alternative measures of forecast uncertainty and hold for different model specifications. The findings suggest that providing information about dissenting votes without additional information about the nature of dissent is detrimental to coordinating household expectations.

Central banks wish to avoid self-fulfilling fluctuations. Monetary rules with a unit response to real rates achieve this under the weakest possible assumptions about the behaviour of households and firms. They are robust to household heterogeneity, hand-to-mouth consumers, non-rational household/firm expectations, active fiscal policy, missing transversality conditions and to any form of intertemporal or nominal-real links. They are easy to employ in practice, using inflation protected bonds to infer real rates. With a time-varying inflation target, they can implement arbitrary inflation dynamics, including optimal policy. They work thanks to the key role played by the Fisher equation in monetary transmission.

Climate change will potentially bring about important macroeconomic effects for all countries in the world and especially for emerging economies. I perform a counterfactual analysis to estimate the potential effect of global warming on the natural interest rate using a state-space semi-structural model of inflation and output determination. The model is estimated with quarterly data for Colombia for the period 1994-2019. I simulate gradual warming of 1êC during this period and include its potential effect on GDP growth and inflation according to recent cross-country estimations in the literature. The estimation with counterfactual data shows that the counterfactual natural interest rate decreases more rapidly to reach near 0% at the end of the period. This result is induced by the persistently negative effects of higher temperatures on trend output growth.

How much deposits and equity a bank has influences how a banks' lending responds to monetary policy. While the responsiveness for the bank lending channel has been well established, this is not the case for the risk-taking channel (RTC). We show in a value-at-risk RTC model that the lending for banks with relatively more equity and non-interest-bearing deposits should respond less to monetary policy tightening. This suggests that non-interest-bearing deposits act as "pseudo capital". In a panel of US banks, we find strong evidence in support of our model for various risk measures.

This paper shows that debt-financed fiscal multipliers vary depending on the maturity of debt issued to finance spending. Utilizing state-dependent SVAR models and local projections for post-war US data, we show that a fiscal expansion financed with short term debt increases output more than one financed with long term debt. The reason for this result is that only the former may lead to a significant increase in private consumption. We then construct an incomplete markets model in which households invest in long and short assets. Short assets have a lower return (in equilibrium) since they provide liquidity services, households can use them to cover sudden spending shocks. An increase in the supply of these assets through a short term debt financed government spending shock makes it easier for constrained households to meet their spending needs and therefore crowds in private consumption. We first prove this analytically in a simplified model and then show it in a calibrated standard New Keynesian model. We finally study the optimal policy under a Ramsey planner. The optimizing government faces a trade-off between the hedging value of long term debt, as its price decreases in response to adverse shocks, and the larger multiplier when it issues short term debt. We find that the latter effect dominates and that the optimal policy for the government is to finance spending predominantly with short term debt.

We identify a novel dimension of monetary policy from high-frequency changes in asset prices around ECB policy events, orthogonal to surprises extracted from risk-free interest rates. We find that it is present in policy events that were interpreted by real-time market commentaries as containing information about asset purchase programmes aimed to stabilise financial markets and safeguard the monetary policy transmission by implementing asset purchases in a exible manner across asset classes and euro area countries. We label this dimension of policy "market-stabilization QE" to contrast it with conventional QE programmes such as the APP launched by the ECB in 2015 aimed to extract duration risk. When including our market-stabilization QE, the R2 for the regression of sovereign yields during the sovereign debt crisis increases by about 50 percentage points and the one of the stock market by 35 percentage points; during the COVID-19 pandemic by 25 and 15 percentage points, respectively. Although it moves euro area stressed-country sovereign yields down and German sovereign yields up as a result of the reversal of ight-to-safety dynamics, it generates strong expansionary macroeconomic effects in all euro area countries including Germany.

The Eurosystem implements its monetary policy through a set of monetary policy instruments (MPIs) that are either part of the standard toolbox or are developed to deal with major economic and financial events with a potential adverse impact on price stability and/or the transmission of monetary policy. In the review period covered by this report (2020-2021), monetary policy action was dominated by the Eurosystem's response to the negative economic effects of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through its action, the Eurosystem continued to expand its balance sheet, in particular by scaling up its outright asset purchases and easing the conditions of its targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs), complemented by temporary changes in the collateral framework. The accommodative monetary policy stance was preserved by maintaining the key ECB interest rates at record-low levels, reinforced by the ECB's forward guidance on policy rates. This report provides a full overview of the Eurosystem's monetary policy implementation over the years 2020 and 2021.

We show that in a New Keynesian model with household heterogeneity, fiscal policy can be a perfect substitute for monetary policy: three simple conditions for consumption taxes, labor taxes, and the government debt level are sufficient to induce the same consumption and labor supply of each household and, thus, the same allocation as interest rate policies. When monetary policy is constrained by a binding lower bound, a currency union, or an exchange rate peg, fiscal policy can therefore replicate any allocation that hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy would generate. This Version: August 10, 2022