Eduardo Amaral · 2024 · Central Bank of Brazil, Working Paper 606
Rupert and Šustek (2019) showed that introducing endogenous capital into the canonical New-Keynesian model allows real interest rates to move in any direction after a positive monetary shock. According to them, this would prove that the real interest rate channel of monetary policy transmission is only observational — not structural — in that class of models, and therefore subject to the Lucas (1976) critique. In this paper, I show that such an identification problem for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) and vector autoregression (VAR) models can be circumvented by incorporating interest-rate smoothing — a feature as prevalent in medium-scale New-Keynesian models as capital itself — into the Taylor rule. I find that the negative association between changes in inflation and changes in the real interest rate is actually more robust than that between the former and changes in the nominal interest rate.
Amaral, Eduardo (2024). “Smoothing the New-Keynesian Capital Puzzle.” Working Paper 606, Central Bank of Brazil.
@techreport{amaral2024smoothing,
author = {Amaral, Eduardo},
title = {Smoothing the New-Keynesian Capital Puzzle},
year = {2024},
institution = {Central Bank of Brazil},
number = {606},
url = {https://www.bcb.gov.br/content/publicacoes/WorkingPaperSeries/WP606v2.pdf}
}