Monetary Policy Transmission Through the Lens of Monetary Conditions Index for India.

The appeal of Monetary Conditions Index either as an operating target or a monetary policy rule has waned over time. Its utility for assessing the monetary policy stance through the lens of alternative channels of monetary policy transmission, however, continues. This paper attempts to construct MCIs for India by approximating four major channels of transmission - interest rate, exchange rate, credit, and asset prices - and examine their suitability to assess the stance of monetary policy as well as the inflation outlook. The weights for these MCIs have been derived using ordinary least squares (OLS) as well as by employing impulse responses of shocks within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. Empirical findings establish the dominant influence of the interest rate channel in India and support MCIs as useful coincident indicators of monetary policy stance and as a relevant lead indicator of inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]