Essays on Unconventional Monetary Policy, Inflation Expectations, and Commodity Prices ; Aufsätze über unkonventionelle Geldpolitik, Inflationserwartungen und Rohstoffpreise
This thesis contains four independent papers which empirically address research questions from macroeconomics and finance. A particular focus of the thesis lies on the effects of unconventional monetary policy (UMP). Following the outbreak of the global financial crisis, and with conventional interest rate policy constrained by the zero lower bound, central banks started using unconventional measures like asset purchases or credit easing. The new tools spurred an intense public and academic debate about their effectiveness in stimulating output and price growth, and potential side-effects associated with them. Two of the papers included in the thesis contribute to this debate. One paper is concerned with spillovers of US UMP to other economies. Specifically, this paper analyzes whether US UMP affects capital flows into emerging market economies and how it impacts on financial and economic conditions in these countries. The other paper focuses on the effectiveness and potential side-effects of UMP in the euro area. It studies whether UMP by the European Central Bank can stimulate price and output growth in the monetary union and its largest member states. Moreover, the paper assesses how fiscal policy reacts to UMP shocks and whether UMP accentuates or attenuates internal trade imbalances within the euro area. A third paper investigates a topic that is important for the conduct of monetary policy, namely the anchoring of inflation expectations. According to models with forward looking Philips curves, like standard New Keynesian models (see Galí, 2015), inflation expectations are an important determinant of future inflation and central banks, therefore, aim at keeping them well anchored at an inflation target. New empirical evidence on the anchoring of inflation expectations in the US is provided in this part of the thesis. A fourth paper is concerned with the financialization of commodity markets. The increased presence of financial investors in the markets coincided with drastic boombust cycles in commodity ...