Research

Abstract:

We examine how fiscal policy can support monetary policy when nominal interest rates face an occasionally binding lower bound constraint. Within the conventional framework of active monetary policy and passive fiscal policy, the optimized fiscal rule features a strong response to inflation deviations from the central bank’s target. The inflation-stabilizing fiscal rule significantly reduces the deflationary bias and welfare costs associated with the lower bound constraint while maintaining debt sustainability. Counterfactual analysis for the U.S. shows that implementing the optimized fiscal rule during the pre-pandemic low-inflation period would have provided systematic support to monetary policy, lifting inflation closer to target when rates were at the lower bound and enabling an earlier rate lift-off. 

Abstract: 

We study the preferential treatment of green bonds in the central bank collateral framework as a climate policy instrument within a DSGE model with climate and financial frictions. In the model, green and carbon-emitting conventional firms issue defaultable corporate bonds to banks that use them as collateral, subject to haircuts determined by the central bank. A haircut reduction induces firms to increase bond issuance, investment, leverage, and default risk. Collateral policy solves a trade-off between increasing collateral supply, adverse effects on firm risk-taking, and subsidizing green investment. Optimal collateral policy is characterized by a haircut gap of 20 percentage points, which increases the green investment share and reduces emissions. However, welfare gains fall well short of what can be achieved with optimal carbon taxes. Moreover, due to elevated risk-taking of green firms, preferential treatment is a qualitatively imperfect substitute of Pigouvian taxation on emissions: if and only if the optimal emission tax can not be implemented, optimal collateral policy features a preferential treatment of green bonds. 

Abstract:

We incorporate expectations heterogeneity across age groups into a New Keynesian model with overlapping generations by assuming that agents only use lifetime observations to forecast inflation and the output gap. Relative to a model version with homogenous expectations, the transmission of monetary policy on inflation is impaired and its stabilisation trade-off under supply shocks aggravates. Since aggregate expectations are a function of the age-distribution, a demographic variation affects the monetary policy transmission on inflation through a composition effect on aggregate expectations. An increase in the share of old individuals enhances the monetary policy transmission on inflation and attenuates its stabilisation trade-off via the composition effect.