Monetary Policy in Small Open Economies: The Role of Exchange Rate Rules

Ana Maria Santacreu

Review, 2015, vol. 97, issue 3, 217-32

Abstract: Understanding the costs and benefits of alternative monetary policy rules is important for economic welfare. Within the context of a small open economy model and building on the work of Mihov and Santacreu (2013), the author analyzes the economic implications of two monetary policy rules. The first is a rule in which the central bank uses the nominal exchange rate as its policy instrument and adjusts the rate whenever there are changes in the economic environment. The second is a standard interest rate rule in which the central bank adjusts the short-term nominal interest rate to changes in the economic environment. The main finding of the analysis is that, if the uncovered interest parity condition that establishes a tight link between the interest rate differential in two countries and the expected rate of depreciation of their currencies does not hold, the exchange rate rule outperforms the standard interest rate rule in lowering the volatility of key economic variables. There are two main reasons for this: First, the actual implementation of the exchange rate rule avoids the overshooting effect on exchange rates characteristic of an interest rate rule. And second, the risk premium that generates deviations from the uncovered interest parity condition is smaller and less volatile under an exchange rate rule.

JEL-codes: E52 E58 F41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publicat ... hange-rate-rules.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

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

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlrv:00044

Access Statistics for this article

Review is currently edited by Juan M. Sanchez

More articles in Review from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott St. Louis ().