This thesis addresses three relevant macroeconomic issues: (i) why
Central Banks behave so cautiously compared to optimal theoretical
benchmarks, (ii) do monetary variables add information about
future Euro Area inflation to a large amount of non monetary
variables and (iii) why national saving and investment are so
correlated in OECD countries in spite of the high degree of
integration of international financial markets.
The process of innovation in the elaboration of economic theory
and statistical analysis of the data witnessed in the last thirty
years has greatly enriched the toolbox available to
macroeconomists. Two aspects of such a process are particularly
noteworthy for addressing the issues in this thesis: the
development of macroeconomic dynamic stochastic general
equilibrium models (see Woodford, 1999b for an historical
perspective) and of techniques that enable to handle large data
sets in a parsimonious and flexible manner (see Reichlin, 2002 for
an historical perspective).
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (DSGE) provide the
appropriate tools to evaluate the macroeconomic consequences of
policy changes. These models, by exploiting modern intertemporal
general equilibrium theory, aggregate the optimal responses of
individual as consumers and firms in order to identify the
aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanisms by the
restrictions imposed by optimizing individual behavior. Such a
modelling strategy, uncovering economic relationships invariant to
a change in policy regimes, provides a framework to analyze the
effects of economic policy that is robust to the Lucas'critique
(see Lucas, 1976). The early attempts of explaining business
cycles by starting from microeconomic behavior suggested that
economic policy should play no role since business cycles
reflected the efficient response of economic agents to exogenous
sources of fluctuations (see the seminal paper by Kydland and Prescott, 1982}
and, more recently, King and Rebelo, 1999). This view was challenged by
several empirical studies showing that the adjustment mechanisms
of variables at the heart of macroeconomic propagation mechanisms
like prices and wages are not well represented by efficient
responses of individual agents in frictionless economies (see, for
example, Kashyap, 1999; Cecchetti, 1986; Bils and Klenow, 2004 and Dhyne et al., 2004). Hence, macroeconomic models currently incorporate
some sources of nominal and real rigidities in the DSGE framework
and allow the study of the optimal policy reactions to inefficient
fluctuations stemming from frictions in macroeconomic propagation
mechanisms.
Against this background, the first chapter of this thesis sets up
a DSGE model in order to analyze optimal monetary policy in an
economy with sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price
adjustments. Price setters are divided in two groups: those
subject to Calvo type nominal rigidities and those able to change
their prices at each period. Sectorial heterogeneity in price
setting behavior is a relevant feature in real economies (see, for
example, Bils and Klenow, 2004 for the US and Dhyne, 2004 for the Euro
Area). Hence, neglecting it would lead to an understatement of the
heterogeneity in the transmission mechanisms of economy wide
shocks. In this framework, Aoki (2001) shows that a Central
Bank maximizing social welfare should stabilize only inflation in
the sector where prices are sticky (hereafter, core inflation).
Since complete stabilization is the only true objective of the
policymaker in Aoki (2001) and, hence, is not only desirable
but also implementable, the equilibrium real interest rate in the
economy is equal to the natural interest rate irrespective of the
degree of heterogeneity that is assumed. This would lead to
conclude that stabilizing core inflation rather than overall
inflation does not imply any observable difference in the
aggressiveness of the policy behavior. While maintaining the
assumption of sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price
adjustments, this chapter adds non negligible transaction
frictions to the model economy in Aoki (2001). As a
consequence, the social welfare maximizing monetary policymaker
faces a trade-off among the stabilization of core inflation,
economy wide output gap and the nominal interest rate. This
feature reflects the trade-offs between conflicting objectives
faced by actual policymakers. The chapter shows that the existence
of this trade-off makes the aggressiveness of the monetary policy
reaction dependent on the degree of sectorial heterogeneity in the
economy. In particular, in presence of sectorial heterogeneity in
price adjustments, Central Banks are much more likely to behave
less aggressively than in an economy where all firms face nominal
rigidities. Hence, the chapter concludes that the excessive
caution in the conduct of monetary policy shown by actual Central
Banks (see, for example, Rudebusch and Svennsson, 1999 and Sack, 2000) might not
represent a sub-optimal behavior but, on the contrary, might be
the optimal monetary policy response in presence of a relevant
sectorial dispersion in the frequency of price adjustments.
DSGE models are proving useful also in empirical applications and
recently efforts have been made to incorporate large amounts of
information in their framework (see Boivin and Giannoni, 2006). However, the
typical DSGE model still relies on a handful of variables. Partly,
this reflects the fact that, increasing the number of variables,
the specification of a plausible set of theoretical restrictions
identifying aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanisms
becomes cumbersome. On the other hand, several questions in
macroeconomics require the study of a large amount of variables.
Among others, two examples related to the second and third chapter
of this thesis can help to understand why. First, policymakers
analyze a large quantity of information to assess the current and
future stance of their economies and, because of model
uncertainty, do not rely on a single modelling framework.
Consequently, macroeconomic policy can be better understood if the
econometrician relies on large set of variables without imposing
too much a priori structure on the relationships governing their
evolution (see, for example, Giannone et al., 2004 and Bernanke et al., 2005).
Moreover, the process of integration of good and financial markets
implies that the source of aggregate shocks is increasingly global
requiring, in turn, the study of their propagation through cross
country links (see, among others, Forni and Reichlin, 2001 and Kose et al., 2003). A
priori, country specific behavior cannot be ruled out and many of
the homogeneity assumptions that are typically embodied in open
macroeconomic models for keeping them tractable are rejected by
the data. Summing up, in order to deal with such issues, we need
modelling frameworks able to treat a large amount of variables in
a flexible manner, i.e. without pre-committing on too many
a-priori restrictions more likely to be rejected by the data. The
large extent of comovement among wide cross sections of economic
variables suggests the existence of few common sources of
fluctuations (Forni et al., 2000 and Stock and Watson, 2002) around which
individual variables may display specific features: a shock to the
world price of oil, for example, hits oil exporters and importers
with different sign and intensity or global technological advances
can affect some countries before others (Giannone and Reichlin, 2004). Factor
models mainly rely on the identification assumption that the
dynamics of each variable can be decomposed into two orthogonal
components - common and idiosyncratic - and provide a parsimonious
tool allowing the analysis of the aggregate shocks and their
propagation mechanisms in a large cross section of variables. In
fact, while the idiosyncratic components are poorly
cross-sectionally correlated, driven by shocks specific of a
variable or a group of variables or measurement error, the common
components capture the bulk of cross-sectional correlation, and
are driven by few shocks that affect, through variable specific
factor loadings, all items in a panel of economic time series.
Focusing on the latter components allows useful insights on the
identity and propagation mechanisms of aggregate shocks underlying
a large amount of variables. The second and third chapter of this
thesis exploit this idea.
The second chapter deals with the issue whether monetary variables
help to forecast inflation in the Euro Area harmonized index of
consumer prices (HICP). Policymakers form their views on the
economic outlook by drawing on large amounts of potentially
relevant information. Indeed, the monetary policy strategy of the
European Central Bank acknowledges that many variables and models
can be informative about future Euro Area inflation. A peculiarity
of such strategy is that it assigns to monetary information the
role of providing insights for the medium - long term evolution of
prices while a wide range of alternative non monetary variables
and models are employed in order to form a view on the short term
and to cross-check the inference based on monetary information.
However, both the academic literature and the practice of the
leading Central Banks other than the ECB do not assign such a
special role to monetary variables (see Gali et al., 2004 and
references therein). Hence, the debate whether money really
provides relevant information for the inflation outlook in the
Euro Area is still open. Specifically, this chapter addresses the
issue whether money provides useful information about future
inflation beyond what contained in a large amount of non monetary
variables. It shows that a few aggregates of the data explain a
large amount of the fluctuations in a large cross section of Euro
Area variables. This allows to postulate a factor structure for
the large panel of variables at hand and to aggregate it in few
synthetic indexes that still retain the salient features of the
large cross section. The database is split in two big blocks of
variables: non monetary (baseline) and monetary variables. Results
show that baseline variables provide a satisfactory predictive
performance improving on the best univariate benchmarks in the
period 1997 - 2005 at all horizons between 6 and 36 months.
Remarkably, monetary variables provide a sensible improvement on
the performance of baseline variables at horizons above two years.
However, the analysis of the evolution of the forecast errors
reveals that most of the gains obtained relative to univariate
benchmarks of non forecastability with baseline and monetary
variables are realized in the first part of the prediction sample
up to the end of 2002, which casts doubts on the current
forecastability of inflation in the Euro Area.
The third chapter is based on a joint work with Domenico Giannone
and gives empirical foundation to the general equilibrium
explanation of the Feldstein - Horioka puzzle. Feldstein and Horioka (1980) found
that domestic saving and investment in OECD countries strongly
comove, contrary to the idea that high capital mobility should
allow countries to seek the highest returns in global financial
markets and, hence, imply a correlation among national saving and
investment closer to zero than one. Moreover, capital mobility has
strongly increased since the publication of Feldstein - Horioka's
seminal paper while the association between saving and investment
does not seem to comparably decrease. Through general equilibrium
mechanisms, the presence of global shocks might rationalize the
correlation between saving and investment. In fact, global shocks,
affecting all countries, tend to create imbalance on global
capital markets causing offsetting movements in the global
interest rate and can generate the observed correlation across
national saving and investment rates. However, previous empirical
studies (see Ventura, 2003) that have controlled for the effects
of global shocks in the context of saving-investment regressions
failed to give empirical foundation to this explanation. We show
that previous studies have neglected the fact that global shocks
may propagate heterogeneously across countries, failing to
properly isolate components of saving and investment that are
affected by non pervasive shocks. We propose a novel factor
augmented panel regression methodology that allows to isolate
idiosyncratic sources of fluctuations under the assumption of
heterogenous transmission mechanisms of global shocks. Remarkably,
by applying our methodology, the association between domestic
saving and investment decreases considerably over time,
consistently with the observed increase in international capital
mobility. In particular, in the last 25 years the correlation
between saving and investment disappears.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BICfB/oai:ulb.ac.be:ETDULB:ULBetd-10082007-120807 |
| Date | 04 June 2007 |
| Creators | Lenza, Michele |
| Contributors | Domenico Giannone, Michael Beine, Pierpaolo Benigno, Philippe Weil, Lucrezia Reichlin |
| Publisher | Universite Libre de Bruxelles |
| Source Sets | Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Communauté française de Belgique |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://theses.ulb.ac.be/ETD-db/collection/available/ULBetd-10082007-120807/ |
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