This paper analyzes optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a model where money and savings are essential and asset markets matter. The model is able to match some stylized facts about the correlation of real interest rates and stock price-dividend ratios. The results show that fiscal policy can improve welfare by increasing the amount of outstanding government debt. If the fiscal authority is not willing or able to increase debt, the monetary authority can improve welfare of current generations by reacting procyclically to asset return shocks; however, this policy affects welfare of future generations if it is not coordinated with fiscal policy measures. The model also shows that policies like QE reduce welfare of future generations.
I develop a model that explicitly takes the role of financial institutions in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy into account. Within this model, I find various equilibrium environments, with one of them resembling a standard environment for monetary policy and another one akin to a liquidity trap. I analyze what the effects of various monetary policy measures such as quantitative easing, open-market operations, helicopter money and negative interest rates are in all of these environments. I find that open-market operations, quantitative easing, and negative interest rates on reserves are powerless in a liquidity trap, while helicopter money can be used to increase investment. The model also shows that a floor system allows a central bank to implement monetary policy with less side effects, but at the cost of losing control over inflation through open-market operations.
Oligopolistic competition in the banking sector and risk in the real economy are important characteristics of developed economies, but have so far mostly been abstracted from in monetary economics. We build a dynamic general equilibrium model of monetary policy transmission that incorporates both of these features and document that including them leads to important insights in our understanding of the transmission mechanism. Various equilibrium cases can occur, and policies have differing effects in these cases. We calibrate the model to the U.S. economy in 2016-2019 in order to study how changes in the degree of banking competition or the policy rate would have affected equilibrium outcomes. We find that doubling banking competition would have increased welfare by 1.02%, but at the cost of increasing the probability of bank default from 0.02% to 0.44%. We further find that the policy rate was set optimally to minimize the probability of bank default, but that a decrease in the policy rate by 1pp would have increased welfare by 0.40%. We also show that bank profits are increasing in the policy rate, in particular when interest rates are low. Thus, a 1pp reduction in the policy rate would have reduced profits per bank by 35.5% in our calibrated economy. Finally, we document that monetary policy passthrough is incomplete under imperfect competition in the banking sector, as a change in the policy rate by 1pp leads to a change of only 0.92pp in the loan rate, while pass-through to the deposit rate is nearly complete for rate increases, but almost zero for rate reductions due to the zero-lower bound.
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