Suchergebnisse

Recent research and events have brought fiscal policy back into the spotlight. Fiscal Taylor rules and error correction models have represented two different ways of quantifying the feedbacks from fiscal and economic conditions to fiscal policy decisions. This paper synthesizes these two ideas, estimating a fiscal Taylor rule as a special case of an error correction model. Using quarterly postwar U.S. data, estimates of a fiscal Taylor rule find that the government sector has sought to stabilize its debt through adjustments to purchases and taxes, in that order, with very little stabilization coming through adjustments to transfer payments. Since 1981, the debt-stabilization motive has almost vanished, while the cyclical behavior of fiscal variables has not changed. This provides indirect evidence that fiscal policy may have become "non-Ricardian" in the US during recent decades.

This paper seeks to understand the behavior of Greenspan's Federal Reserve in the late 1990s Some authors suggest that the Fed followed a simple Taylor rule while others argue that it deviated from such a rule because it recognized that the New Economy permitted an easing of policy We find that a Taylor rule based on inflation and unemployment does break down in the late 1990s However the Fed's behavior appears stable once one accounts for the falling NAIRU of the period A rule based on inflation and the deviation of unemployment from the NAIRU captures the Fed's behavior through the entire period from 1987 to 2000

This paper examines the effect of government ideology on monetary policy in a quarterly data set of 15 OECD countries in the period 1980.1-2005.4. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant indicator for central bank independence and government ideology. The results suggest that leftist governments did not decrease short term nominal interest rates at all. In contrast, short term nominal interest rates were higher under leftist governments. A potential reason for this finding might be that leftist governments have sought to make a market-oriented policy shift by delegating monetary policy to conservative central bankers. -- Monetary policy ; Taylor rule ; government ideology ; partisan politics ; central bank independence ; panel data

Evaluating inflation-targeting monetary policy is more complicated than checking whether inflation has been on target, because inflation control is imperfect and flexible inflation targeting means that deviations from target may be deliberate in order to stabilize the real economy. A modified Taylor curve, the forecast Taylor curve, showing the tradeoff between the variability of the inflation-gap and output-gap forecasts can be used to evaluate policy ex ante, that is, taking into account the information available at the time of the policy decisions, and even evaluate policy in real time. In particular, by plotting mean squared gaps of inflation and output-gap forecasts for alternative policy-rate paths, it may be examined whether policy has achieved an efficient stabilization of both inflation and the real economy and what relative weight on the stability of inflation and the real economy has effectively been applied. Ex ante evaluation may be more relevant than evaluation ex post, after the fact. Publication of the interest-rate path also allows the evaluation of its credibility and the effectiveness of the implementation of monetary policy.

The paper presents a human-capital-based endogenous growth, cash- in-advance economy with endogenous velocity where exchange credit is produced in a decentralized banking sector, and money is supplied stochastically by the central bank. From this it derives an exact functional form for a general equilibrium 'Taylor rule'. The inflation coefficient is always greater than one when the velocity of money exceeds one; velocity growth enters the equilibrium condition as a separate variable. The paper then successfully estimates the magnitude of the coefficient on inflation from 1000 samples of Monte Carlo simulated data. This shows that it would be spurious to conclude that the central bank has a reaction function with a strong response to inflation in a 'Taylor principle' sense, since it is only meeting fiscal needs through the inflation tax. The paper also estimates several deliberately misspecified models to show how an inflation coefficient of less than one can result from model misspecification. An inflation coefficient greater than one holds theoretically along the balanced growth path equilibrium, making it a sharply robust principle based on the economy's underlying structural parameters.