Published papers

with Julien Pinter

We analyze how financial constraints can weigh on a central bank’s decision to exit a temporary currency peg, such as the one put in place in Switzerland between 2011 and 2015. We show that negative equity or insolvency concerns can force a central bank to exit such a peg earlier than it would have done absent such concerns. We detail under which conditions such reasoning can apply for a traditional inflation-averse central bank. We then build an exchange market pressure model fitting with current peg reality to forecast both the central bank future bond holdings under a peg as well as its future losses. Applying our model to the Swiss franc peg, we show that negative equity concerns could have motivated the Swiss central bank early and puzzling peg exit in 2015, thereby providing a potential explanation for the “Frankenshock”. ECB QE policy appears as a potential key driver of this decision.

[ Article ] [ Working paper version ]

with William Ginn

Food price volatility is a major threat for welfare, economic prosperity and political stability. The monetary authority is generally viewed in the literature as the only institution responsible for price stability, however this approach overlooks the importance of food price stabilization policies using fiscal instruments. We develop and estimate a Bayesian DSGE model that incorporates monetary and fiscal policy tailored to India, replicating food demand and food supply subsidies. We find that following a world food price shock, CPI and therefore interest rate volatility would be 21\% higher in the absence of food subsidies. Putting this effect aside would lead to overestimating the effectiveness of inflation targeting by the central bank. Accordingly, we find that the subsidy policy has large heterogeneous distributional welfare effects: while farmers benefit from all subsidies, the inclusion of urban households into the demand subsidy program is required to offset supply subsidy welfare cost.

[ Article ] [ Working paper version]

with Antonia López-Villavicencio

We use the taper tantrum to measure the effects of a sudden depreciation of the exchange rate. We treat this announcement in the USA as an exogenous shock in emerging markets and use a difference-in-differences approach. We show that, before the tantrum, the impact of exchange rate changes on inflation is low in both the control and the treatment groups. However, the tantrum increased the gap between groups and impacted inflation regardless of the exchange rate regime or central bank practices. Nevertheless, inflation in economies with flexible exchange rate, inflation target or highly credible central bank is less exposed to depreciations.

[ Article ] [ Local_copy ]

with William Ginn

We examine whether food price shocks are a major source of macroeconomic fluctuations. We estimate a small open economy DSGE model using an alternative Taylor rule applied to Chilean data. The empirical evidence suggests that food inflation played a non-trivial role in shaping Chile's de facto monetary policy actions. Consistent with its commitment to price stability, the central bank increases the policy rate in reaction to food inflation. Despite an immediate monetary policy reaction to a food price shock, the policy rate gradually tapers off. This is due to a second-round effect on non-food inflation propagated by the food price shock. A main finding is that monetary policy that targets headline inflation is welfare improving.

[ Article ] [ Local_copy ]

with Nacera Yeddou

This paper uses a new, hand-collected database on ownership structure for a sample of commercial banks from 17 western European countries to explore the relationship between bank ownership structure and bank liquidity creation over the period 2004–2018. We focus on bank ownership concentration and on the identity of the major owner. Our findings are twofold: first, we find that ownership concentration has a significant and positive impact on liquidity creation. Specifically, we find that banks with over 65 % controlling ownership create more liquidity than other banks. Secondly, we analyze the impact of the nature of the owner on liquidity creation. We find that banks tend to create more liquidity when the owner is another bank or a state, holding a stake above 50 %, 65 % for a non-financial company, 75 % for a family and 85 % for a financial institution.

[ Article ] [ Post-print ]

with William Ginn

Food price subsidies are a prevalent means by which fiscal authorities may counteract food price volatility in middle-income countries (MIC). We develop a DSGE model for a MIC that captures this key channel of a policy induced price smoothing mechanism that is different to, yet in parallel with, the classic Calvo price stickiness approach, which can have consequential effects for monetary policy. We then use the model to address how the joint fiscal and monetary policy responds to an increase in inflation driven by a food price shock can affect welfare. We show that, in the presence of credit constrained households and households with a significant share of food expenditures, a coordinated reaction of fiscal and monetary policies via subsidized price targeting can improve aggregate welfare. Subsidies smooth prices and consumption, especially for credit constrained households, which can consequently result in an interest rate reaction less intensely with subsidized price targeting compared with headline price targeting.

[ Article ] [ Post-print ]

with Antonia López-Villavicencio

This paper estimates the effects of different forms of inflation targeting (IT) in the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT). To this end, we first estimate the ERPT for a large sample of countries using state-space models. We then consider the adoption of an inflation targeting framework by a country as a treatment to find suitable counterfactuals to the actual targeters. By controlling for self-selection bias and endogeneity of the monetary policy regime, we confirm that the ERPT tends to be lower for countries adopting explicit IT. However, we uncover that older regimes, adopting a range or point with tolerance band and keeping inflation close to the target, outperform other IT regimes. We also show that IT is effective even with a relatively high inflation target or low central bank independence.

[ Article ] [Post-print]

with Antonia López-Villavicencio

In this paper we employ state-space models to estimate the pass-through of oil price changes to consumer prices for a large sample of countries from 1970 to 2017. By controlling for self-selection bias and endogeneity and allowing for different responses to positive and negative price changes, we asses the differences between explicit inflation targeting (IT) countries and a control group. Surprisingly perhaps, our results suggest that the pass-through is higher for IT countries. Our main contribution is to show that these is mainly due to IT countries having a significant higher pass-through than non-IT countries when the oil price decreases: a 10% drop in oil price leads about a 0.11% drop in inflation in ITers (of which 4pp are explained by the monetary regime). Importantly, we show that adopting IT reduces the asymmetry of the pass-through. We run several robustness checks and conclude that falling oil prices are more welcomed by the central banks with an IT framework, in particular during deflationary episodes or when inflation is above the target.

[ Article ] [ Post-print ]

with Benjamin Carton and Dramane Coulibaly

The two episodes of food price surges in 2007 and 2011 followed by a drop in 2014 have been particularly challenging for developing and emerging economies’ central banks and have raised the question of how monetary authorities should react to such external relative price shocks. We investigate the optimal monetary policy that manages food price shocks. To this end, we develop a new-Keynesian small open-economy model that incorporates world food price shocks. We show that the optimal monetary policy depends on country income level. In low and medium income countries, overall consumer price targeting is optimal, while in high-income countries non-food inflation targeting is the best option. This result holds not only because food represents a significant share in total consumption in low and medium income countries, but also because of food good composition. Indeed, the poorer the country, the higher the share of purely domestic food in consumption and the more detrimental lack of attention to the evolution in food prices.

[ Article ] [ Working Paper ]

We investigate the role of exchange rates in inflation-targeting emerging economies. We give strong evidence that hybrid inflation-targeting frameworks, where exchange rate is managed, deliver a stronger nominal anchor, as they show better resistance to the 2007–2008 inflation shock.

[ Article ] [ Post-print ]