Marcel Fratzscher, President of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), comments on the results of today’s meeting of the European Central Bank (ECB):
We develop a structural vector autoregressive framework that combines external instruments and heteroskedasticity for identification of monetary policy shocks. We show that exploiting both types of information sharpens structural inference, allows testing the relevance and exogeneity condition for instruments separately using likelihood ratio tests, and facilitates the economic interpretation of the ...
Spillovers from US monetary policy entail spillbacks to the domestic economy. Applying counterfactual analyses in a Bayesian proxy structural vector-autoregressive model we find that spillbacks account for a non-trivial share of the slowdown in domestic real activity following a contractionary US monetary policy shock. Spillbacks materialise as a monetary policy tightening depresses foreign sales and ...
We test for the empirical relevance of partial and asymmetric dominant-currency pricing (DCP), the hypothesis that large but not necessarily identical shares of economies’ export and import prices are sticky in US dollar. We first set up a structural three-country New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which nests DCP, producer-currency pricing and local-currency pricing. Under ...
This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. It compiles a new database of 266,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering up to 91 countries. The main insight is that, as in equity markets, the returns on external sovereign bonds have been sufficiently high to compensate for risk. Real ...
Negative interest rates remain a controversial policy for central banks. We study a novel signalling channel and ask under what conditions negative rates should exist in an optimal policymaker’s toolkit. We prove two necessary conditions for the optimality of negative rates: a time-consistent policy setting and a preference for policy smoothing. These conditions allow negative rates to signal policy ...
We study the multifaceted effects of trade policy shocks on financial markets using a structural vector autoregression identified via event day heteroskedasticity. We find that restrictive US trade policy shocks affect US and international stock prices heterogeneously, but generally negatively. They increase market uncertainty, lower US interest rates, and lead to an appreciation of the US dollar. ...