Posts Tagged economic

Monetary Aggregates Play Little Role In The Conduct Of Monetary Policy

In conventional macroeconomic thinking, the money supply is considered the main determinant of long-run inflation. A variety of monetary aggregates have been proposed to measure the money supply. Yet, nowadays, monetary aggregates play little role in monetary policy deliberations at most central banks.

A new study in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking examines the leading arguments for assigning an important role to tracking the growth of monetary aggregates when making decisions about monetary policy. The analysis finds that none of the arguments provides a compelling reason to assign a prominent role to monetary aggregates.

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Does monetary policy have asymmetric effects on stock returns

IT HAS BEEN OF GREAT interest to both macroeconomists and financial economists of whether monetary policy affects stock returns. A number of studies have empirically investigated the effects of monetary policy on stock returns. Using money aggregate data as a measure of money supply, some empirical studies agree that stock returns lag behind changes in monetary policy; for instance, see Keran (1971), Homa and Jaffee (1971), and Hamburner and Kochin (1972). In contrast, Cooper (1974), Pesando (1974), Rozeff (1974), and Rogalski and Vinso (1977) show that there is no significant forecasting power of past changes in money. Ever since the seminal paper by Bernanke and Blinder (1992), the Federal funds rate has been the most widely used measure of monetary policy. As such, the relationship between monetary policy and stock returns has been reexamined by using the interest rate instrument in the financial literature. Thorbecke (1997) and Patelis (1997) demonstrate that shifts in monetary policy help to explain U.S. stock returns. Conover, Jensen, and Johnson (1999) show that foreign stock returns generally react both to local and U.S. monetary policy.

Two important contributions to the literature on the effects of monetary policy on the stock market have been made. The first one emphasizes the roles of financial markets’ expectations about the future course of monetary policy. Bernanke and Kuttner (2003) extract unanticipated monetary policy from Federal funds futures and find that monetary policy surprises appear to have a significant effect on equity prices through changes in the equity premium. The second focus is on the prospect of endogeneity. Rigobon and Sack (2003) show that the causality between interest rates and stock prices may run in both directions. After accounting for this endogeneity, they find a significant monetary policy response to the stock market.

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Monetary policy and the term structure of interest rates in Japan.

This paper is investigates the relationship between the Japanese yield curve and monetary policy. In the 1980s and 1990s average bond yields have risen from 5% to 8% and then fallen to 2% and the slope of the yield curve has swung from positive to negative to positive. We are interested in understanding the contribution of monetary policy to these movements in the yield curve.

One motivation for our interest is Japan’s recent experience. In spite of massive increases in monetary base and a zero nominal interest rate, economic growth has remained low and deflationary pressure has not abated. These events are raising new questions about the effectiveness of monetary policy under a zero nominal interest rate policy. Eggertson and Woodford (2003) argue that a monetary authority can still influence economic activity when nominal interest rates are zero by taking actions that affect market expectations about the future time path of variables such as interest rates, inflation or exchange rates. One way to assess the ability of a central bank to affect expectations is to look retrospectively and ascertain the extent to which previous monetary policy surprises have affected bond yields of different maturities. If monetary policy is indeed a potent tool for altering expectations then this should show up in the responses and variance decompositions of medium and long-term bonds yields to suitably identified shocks to monetary policy.

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