Journal of Money, Credit and Banking

- Publisher:
- Wiley
- Publication date:
- 2021-02-01
- ISBN:
- 0022-2879
Issue Number
Latest documents
- Superkurtosis
Very little is known on how traditional risk metrics behave under intraday trading. We fill this void by examining the finiteness of the returns' moments and assessing the impact of their infinity in a risk management framework. We show that when intraday trading is considered, assuming finite higher order moments, potential losses are materially larger than what the theory predicts, and they increase exponentially as the trading frequency increases—a phenomenon we call superkurtosis$superkurtosis$. Hence, the use of the current risk management techniques under intraday trading imposes threats to the stability of financial markets, as capital ratios are severely underestimated.
- Endogenous Growth, Skill Obsolescence, and Output Hysteresis in a New Keynesian Model with Unemployment
We embed skill obsolescence and endogenous growth into a New Keynesian model with search‐and‐matching frictions. The model accounts for key features of the Great Recession: the “productivity puzzle” and the “missing disinflation puzzle.” Lower aggregate demand raises long‐term unemployment and the training costs associated with skill obsolescence. Lower aggregate employment hinders learning‐by‐doing, which slows down human capital accumulation, feeding back into even fewer vacancies than justified by the demand shock alone. These feedback channels mitigate the disinflationary effect of the demand shock while amplifying its contractionary effect on output. The temporary growth slowdown translates into output hysteresis.
- Debt Overhang and Lack of Lender's Commitment
The debt overhang of sovereigns or firms is modeled in the recent literature as a constrained efficient outcome of dynamic debt contracts under the lack of the borrower's commitment, where debt relief is not Pareto‐improving. The early literature observes another type of debt overhang where the borrower is discouraged from expending effort, anticipating the lender to take all output ex post. We show that this inefficiency is due to the lack of the lender's commitment and debt relief is Pareto‐improving. Nevertheless, debt overhang may persist, as frictional bargaining over debt relief can take a long time.
- Issue Information
- Disagreement in Consumer Inflation Expectations
By carefully matching the data sets from the Michigan Survey of Consumers with the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that there exists substantial heterogeneity in the propensity of U.S. households to learn from experts in forming inflation expectations. Additional results for a group of European economies broadly confirm this observation. We advance an extended version of the sticky‐information model to analyze disagreement in consumer inflation expectations. Besides differences in consumers' propensities to learn, disagreement in our model arises from heterogeneity in consumers' fundamental inflation and past expectations and experts' different views about future inflation.
- Does Real‐Time Macroeconomic Information Help to Predict Interest Rates?
We analyze the predictive ability of real‐time macroeconomic information for the yield curve of interest rates. We specify a mixed‐frequency macro‐yields model in real time that incorporates interest rate surveys and treats macroeconomic factors as unobservable components. Results indicate that real‐time macroeconomic information is helpful to predict interest rates, and that data revisions drive a superior predictive ability of revised macro data over real‐time macro data. We also find that interest rate surveys can have significant predictive power over and above real‐time macroeconomic variables.
- Does the Exchange Rate Respond to Monetary Policy in Mexico? Solving an Exchange Rate Puzzle in Emerging Markets
This paper argues that the null or weak response of emerging market currencies to domestic monetary policy documented in the literature is the result of wide event windows. An event study with intraday data for Mexico shows that an unanticipated tightening appreciates the currency and flattens the yield curve, consistent with the evidence for advanced economies. With daily event windows, however, only the yield curve responds to monetary policy. Noise in daily exchange rate returns explains the lack of response of the currency. Such noise gives rise to a bias that declines after controlling for potential omitted variables.
- How Does Monetary Policy Affect Welfare? Some New Estimates Using Data on Life Evaluation and Emotional Well‐Being
Models on the optimal design of monetary policy typically rely on a welfare loss function defined over unemployment and inflation. We estimate such a function using two different dimensions of well‐being. The first evaluates how close one is to “the best possible life” on a ladder scale. The second captures the emotional quality of everyday experiences. Our Gallup World Poll sample covers 1.5 million people in 141 nations from 2005 to 2019. Unemployment and inflation reduce well‐being across all measures. The ratio of the unemployment‐to‐inflation effect is 6.2 for the “Ladder‐of‐Life.” It is lower for positive day‐to‐day experiences and higher for negative ones.
- A Theory of Intrinsic Inflation Persistence
We propose a novel theory of intrinsic inflation persistence by introducing trend inflation and Kimball (1995)‐type aggregators of individual differentiated goods and labor in a model with staggered price‐ and wage‐setting. Under nonzero trend inflation, the non‐CES (constant elasticity of substitution) aggregator of goods and staggered price‐setting give rise to a variable real marginal cost of goods aggregation, which becomes a driver of inflation. This marginal cost consists of an aggregate of the goods' relative prices, which depends on past inflation, thereby generating intrinsic inertia in inflation. Likewise, the non‐CES aggregator of labor and staggered wage‐setting lead to intrinsic inertia in wage inflation, which enhances the persistence of price inflation. With the theory we show that inflation exhibits a persistent, hump‐shaped response to monetary policy shocks. We also demonstrate that lower trend inflation reduces inflation persistence and that a credible disinflation leads to a gradual decline in inflation and a fall in output.
- News Shocks, Business Cycles, and the Disinflation Puzzle
We argue that key findings of the empirical literature on the effects of news about future technology—including their tendency to generate negative comovement of macro‐economic aggregates, and their puzzling disinflationary nature—are due to measurement errors in total factor productivity (TFP). In this paper, we estimate the macro‐economic effects of news shocks in the United States using an agnostic identification approach that is robust to measurement errors. We find no evidence of negative comovement conditional on a news shock, and the disinflation puzzle essentially vanishes under our identification strategy. Our results also indicate that news shocks have become an important driver of business‐cycle fluctuations in recent years.
Featured documents
- The Skewness of the Price Change Distribution: A New Touchstone for Sticky Price Models
We present a new way of empirically evaluating various sticky price models that are used to assess the degree of monetary nonneutrality. While menu cost models uniformly predict that price change skewness and dispersion fall with inflation, in the Calvo model, both rise. However, the U.S. Consumer...
- Endogenous Growth and Real Effects of Monetary Policy: R&D and Physical Capital Complementarities
We study the real long‐run effects of the structural stance of monetary policy and of inflation, in the context of a monetary growth model where R&D is complemented with physical capital accumulation. We look into the effects on a set of real macroeconomic variables that have been of interest to...
- (In)Efficient Interbank Networks
We study the efficiency properties of the formation of an interbank network. Banks face a trade‐off by establishing connections in the interbank market. On the one hand, banks improve the diversification of their liquidity risk and therefore can obtain a higher expected payoff. On the other hand,...
- Fiscal Requirements for Dynamic and Real Determinacies in Economies with Private Provision of Liquidity: A Monetarist Assessment
We study the impact of fiscal policies on the inherent links between inflation, unemployment, and asset prices in an environment where firms provide liquidity and the central bank follows a constant money growth rate rule. Firms, other than hiring workers, also supply private assets that are not...
- Countercyclical Foreign Currency Borrowing: Eurozone Firms in 2007–09
Using syndicated loan‐level data, we document and explain the causes and implications of a new and surprising stylized fact. In the midst of the financial crisis, dollar borrowing by leveraged Eurozone (EZ) corporates rose dramatically relative to their euro borrowing. We show that this resulted...
- Inflation and Welfare in a Competitive Search Equilibrium with Asymmetric Information
We study an economy characterized by competitive search and asymmetric information. Money is essential. Buyers decide their cash holdings after observing the contracts posted by firms and experience match‐specific preference shocks which remain unknown to sellers. Firms are allowed to post general...
- Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States
We document that seasonal temperatures have significant and systematic effects on the U.S. economy, both at the aggregate level and across a wide cross section of economic sectors. This effect is particularly strong for the summer: a 1oF increase in the average summer temperature is associated with ...
- Safe Assets as Commodity Money
This paper presents a model in which safe assets are systemic because they are the medium of exchange in risky assets. It connects the literature from banking and finance on safe assets to the monetary literature on alternative monetary systems involving commodity money, interest bearing money, and ...
- U.S. Monetary Policy and International Bond Markets
This paper analyzes how U.S. monetary policy affects the pricing of dollar‐denominated sovereign debt. We document that yields on dollar‐denominated sovereign bonds are highly responsive to U.S. monetary policy surprises—during both the conventional and unconventional policy regimes—and that the...
- On the Relationship between Domestic Saving and the Current Account: Evidence and Theory for Developing Countries
We examine the relationship between domestic saving and the current account in developing countries. Our three main findings are that: (i) domestic saving has a small effect on the current account; (ii) domestic saving has a significant positive effect on the trade balance—this effect is much...