Systematic monetary policy and persistence

Luca Bindelli

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'Econométrie et d'Economie politique (DEEP) from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, DEEP

Abstract: Woodford (1999 and 2003) has raised the theoretical possibility that in a standard, forward looking sticky price model, an independent channel of inertia might arise as a result of policy behavior. We analyze this assertion empirically, and estimate a standard model, in which the monetary authority is assumed to commit to an optimal rule. We contribute to the existing literature by identifying the purely policy induced persistence present in the model. We also analyze the role of the structural parameters reflecting policy preferences and price flexibility in altering the policy induced, as well as the overall persistence properties of the model. We find that such a model is able to replicate most of the data's moments. In constrast to previous empirical literature, lagged terms in both modelled Phillips and IS curves are found to be either insignificant or very small. Commitment policy alone can explain a substantial part of output persistence. While the pricing mechanism at the heart of this model helps transfer output persistence into inflation persistence, commitment policy manages to undo this link by undershooting the inflation target following a positive 'cost push' shock so that inflation persistence is slightly reduced compared to the discretionary policy case.

Keywords: persistence; optimal monetary policy; supply shock; Kalman filter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-fmk, nep-mac and nep-mon
Date: 2005-05
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/textes/05.07.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'Econométrie et d'Economie politique (DEEP) from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, DEEP
Address: Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, DEEP, Internef, CH-1015 Lausanne
Series data maintained by Claudine Delapierre Saudan ().