|
|
Three Essays on Empirical Analysis of Economic Policy
Baxa, Jaromír ; Vošvrda, Miloslav (advisor) ; Vašíček, Osvald (referee) ; Hančlová, Jana (referee) ; Slačálek, Jiří (referee)
This dissertation thesis is focused on the empirical analysis of monetary and fiscal policy using nonlinear models. In the first part, I examine the evolution of monetary policy rules in a group of inflation targeting countries. I apply a moment-based estimator in a time-varying parameter model with endogenous regressors. The main findings are twofold. First, with adoption of inflation targeting, coefficients in the monetary policy rules changed rather gradually. Second, the response of interest rates to inflation is particularly strong during periods when central bankers want to break a record of high inflation. Contrary to common view, the response of interest rates to inflation becomes less aggressive after the adoption of inflation targeting, suggesting a positive anchoring effect of this regime on inflation expectations. The second part discusses whether and how the selected central banks responded to episodes of financial stress over the last three decades. The time-varying monetary policy rule is extended for an indicator of financial stress, in order to show the departures of policy rules under financial instability. The findings suggest that central banks often decrease policy rates in the face of high financial stress. However, the size of the policy response varies substantially over time as well...
|
|
|
Labour Market Modelling within a DSGE Approach
Tonner, Jaromír ; Tvrz, Stanislav ; Vašíček, Osvald
The goal of this paper is to find a suitable way of modelling the main labour market variables in the framework of the CNB’s core DSGE model. The model selection criteria are: the predictive ability for unemployment, the change in the overall predictive ability in comparison to the baseline model and the extent of the required model change. We find that the incorporation of a modified Galí, Smets and Wouters (2011) labour market specification allows us to predict unemployment with an acceptable forecast error. At the same time it leads to a moderate improvement in the overall predictive ability of the model and requires only minor adjustments to the model structure. Thus, it should be preferred to more complicated concepts that yield a similar improvement in predictive ability. We also came to the conclusion that the concept linking unemployment and the GDP gap is promising. However, its practical application would require (additional) improvement in the accuracy of the consumption prediction. As a practical experiment, we compare the inflation pressures arising from nominal wages and the exchange rate in the baseline model and in alternative specifications. The experiment is motivated by the use of the exchange rate as an additional monetary policy instrument by the CNB since November 2013 in an environment of near-zero interest rates and growing disinflationary pressures. We find that the baseline model tends to forecast higher nominal wage growth and lower exchange rate depreciation than the models with more elaborate labour markets. Therefore, the alternative models would probably have identified an even higher need for exchange rate depreciation than the baseline model did.
Fulltext:  PDF
|
|
| |
guest ::
RSS feed.