Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1348:
Distance to Frontier and the Big Swings of the Unemployment Rate: What Room is Left for Monetary Policy?
Kevin X.D. Huang and Qinglai Meng
Abstract: In sticky price models with endogenous investment,
virtually all monetary policy rules that set a nominal interest rate in
response solely to future in°ation induce real indeterminacy of
equilibrium. Applying the Samuelson-Farebrother conditions, we obtain a
necessary and suffcient condition for local real determinacy, which reveals
that increasing price stickiness or letting policy respond also to current
output may help ensure a unique equilibrium. We find that the first channel
by itself has a quantitatively negligible effect and almost all strict
inflation-targeting rules lead to indeterminacy, whether with higher price
stickiness or overall stickiness by incorporating firm-specific capital,
sticky wages, or both. The effect of the second avenue depends on labor
supply elasticity and stickiness. With high labor supply elasticity and
price stickiness, indeterminacy is much less likely to occur as policy also
responds to output. With estimated labor supply elasticity or empirically
reasonable price stickiness, policy's response to output helps little in
ensuring determinacy; even incorporating firm-specific capital makes only a
marginal improvement. Incorporating sticky wages, on the other hand,
greatly enhances the role of policy's response to output in ensuring
determinacy. With both sticky wages and firm-specific capital incorporated,
even a tiny response of policy to current output can render equilibrium
determinate for a wide range of response of policy to future inflation.
Keywords: Forward-looking inflation targeting; Current output; Sticky prices; Sticky wages; Firm-specific capital; Endogenous investment; Indeterminacy; Samuelson-Farebrother conditions; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: E12,; E31,; E52; (follow links to similar papers)
48 pages, June 2007
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