Current Table of Contents

• Editors' Note
  
• Time Inconsistency and Free-Riding in a Monetary Union
  In monetary unions, a time inconsistency problem in monetary policy leads to a novel type of free-rider problem in the setting of non-monetary policies. The free-rider problem leads union members to pursue lax non-monetary policies that induce the monetary authority to generate high inflation. Free-riding can be mitigated by imposing constraints on non-monetary policies. Without a time inconsistency problem, the union has no free-rider problem; then constraints on non-monetary policies are unnecessary and possibly harmful. This theory is here detailed and applied to several non-monetary policies: labor market policy, fiscal policy, and bank regulation.
• Energy Price Shocks and the Macroeconomy: The Role of Consumer Durables
  We create a model with a distinction between investment in consumer durables and capital goods, as well as energy use by households and firms, to evaluate the importance of energy price shocks for output fluctuations. Simulation results indicate that this economy has a smaller proportion of output fluctuations attributable to energy price shocks than one without durable goods and household energy use. We show that an energy price hike is absorbed by reducing investment in durables more than in fixed capital. This rebalancing effect cushions the hit to future production. Thus, productivity shocks remain the prime driver for output fluctuations.
• Finance, Firm Size, and Growth
  Although research shows that financial development accelerates aggregate economic growth, economists have not resolved conflicting theoretical predictions and ongoing policy disputes about the cross-firm distributional effects of financial development. Using cross-industry, cross-country data, the results are consistent with the view that financial development exerts a disproportionately positive effect on small firms. These results have implications for understanding the political economy of financial sector reform.
• Exchange Rate Changes and Inflation in Post-Crisis Asian Economies: Vector Autoregression Analysis of the Exchange Rate Pass-Through
  Macro-economic consequences of large currency depreciations among the crisis-hit Asian economies varied from one country to another. Inflation did not soar after the Asian currency crisis of 1997[ndash]98 in most crisis-hit countries except Indonesia where high inflation followed a very large nominal depreciation of the rupiah. The high inflation meant a loss of price competitive advantage, a key for economic recovery from a crisis. This paper examines the pass-through effects of exchange rate changes on the domestic prices in the East Asian economies using a vector autoregression analysis. The main results are as follows: (i) the degree of exchange rate pass-through to import prices was quite high in the crisis-hit economies; (ii) the pass-through to Consumer Price Index (CPI) was generally low, with a notable exception of Indonesia; and (iii) in Indonesia, both the impulse response of monetary policy variables to exchange rate shocks and that of CPI to monetary policy shocks were positive, large, and statistically significant. Thus, Indonesia's accommodative monetary policy, coupled with the high degree of CPI responsiveness to exchange rate changes was an important factor in the inflation-depreciation spiral in the wake of the currency crisis.
• What Accounts for the Changes in U.S. Fiscal Policy Transmission?
  Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series for 1957[ndash]79 and 1983[ndash]2004, we find government spending shocks to have stronger effects on output, consumption, and wages in the earlier period. We try to account for this observation within a DSGE model featuring price rigidities and limited asset market participation. Specifically, we estimate the structural parameters of the model for both periods by matching impulse responses. Model-based counterfactual experiments suggest that most of the changes in fiscal policy transmission are accounted for by increased asset market participation and the more active monetary policy of the Volcker[ndash]Greenspan period.
• Canonical Term-Structure Models with Observable Factors and the Dynamics of Bond Risk Premia
  We derive a canonical representation for the no-arbitrage discrete-time term structure models with both observable and unobservable state variables, popularized by Ang and Piazzesi (2003). We conduct a specification analysis based on this canonical representation and we analyze how alternative parameterizations affect estimated risk premia, impulse response functions, and variance decompositions. We find a trade-off between the need to obtain parsimonious parameterizations and the ability of the models to match observed patterns of variation in risk premia. We also find that more richly parameterized models uncover a greater influence of macroeconomic fundamentals on the long-end of the yield curve.
• Testing Term Structure Estimation Methods: Evidence from the UK STRIPS Market
  Prices and yields of UK government zero-coupon bonds are used to test alternative yield curve estimation models. Zero-coupon bonds permit a more pure comparison, as the models are providing only the interpolation service and also not making estimation feasible. It is found that better yield curves estimates are obtained by fitting to the yield curve directly rather than fitting first to the discount function. A simple procedure to set the smoothness of the fitted curves is developed, and a positive relationship between over-smoothness and the fitting error is identified. A cubic spline function fitted directly to the yield curve provides the best overall balance of fitting error and smoothness, both along the yield curve and within local maturity regions.
• Sticky Information Phillips Curves: European Evidence
  We estimate the Sticky Information Phillips Curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, while in Italy, about once each 6 months.
• Incomplete Intertemporal Consumption Smoothing and Incomplete Risk Sharing
  This paper develops a method to estimate jointly the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing and the degree of "inter-regional" risk sharing. The empirical results for the U.S. states and OECD and EU countries suggest that: (i) regardless of the assumption on the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing, the degree of risk sharing within a country is larger than across countries; (ii) the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing within a country is also larger than across countries; and (iii) the difference between the degree of intertemporal consumption smoothing within U.S. states and across OECD and EU countries is as large as the difference between the degree of risk sharing, contrary to the findings of some past studies.
• The Intraday Price of Money: Evidence from the e-MID Interbank Market
  We provide empirical evidence, based on tick-by-tick data for the e-MID euro area interbank market covering 2003 and 2004, that the overnight interest rate shows a clear downward pattern throughout the operating day. Thus, a positive hourly interest rate (half basis point) implicitly emerges from the intraday term structure of the overnight rate. Such a pattern was not detected in the mid-1990s: we explain this evolution as an outcome of the recent trend toward real-time settlement. The estimated intraday interest rate is lower than in the United States: this is due to the different cost of central bank daylight credit.
• Political Regimes and the Cost of Disinflation
  This study investigates, using data from 1960 to 1998, whether the nature of political regimes can help explain cross-national and intertemporal variations in the cost of disinflationary policies, as measured by the sacrifice ratio. We show that, ceteris paribus, right-wing governments have lower costs of disinflations than left-wing governments. We argue this is due to a superior credibility, resulting from their stronger anti-inflation reputations. In addition (and in marked contrast to previous studies), we find that when we control for political regimes, trade openness, and other standard factors in this literature, central bank independence has no significant effect on the sacrifice ratio.