We analyze the conditions of emergence of a twin banking and sovereign debt crisis within a monetary union in which: (i) the central bank is not allowed to provide direct …nancial support to stressed member states or to play the role of lender of last resort in sovereign bond markets, and (ii) the responsibility of …ghting against large scale bank runs, ascribed to domestic governments, is ensured through the implementation of a …nancial safety net (banking regulation and government deposit guarantee). We show that this broad institutional architecture, typical of the Eurozone at the onset of the …nancial crisis, is not always able to prevent the occurrence of a twin banking and sovereign debt crisis triggered by pessimistic investors' expectations. Without signi…cant backstop by the central bank, the …nancial safety net may actually aggravate, instead of improve, the …nancial situation of banks and of the government.
We study in a New Keynesian framework the consequences of adaptive learning for the design of robust monetary policy. Compared to rational expectations, the fact that private sector follows adaptive learning gives the central bank an additional intertemporal trade-off between optimal behavior in the present and in later periods thanks to its ability to manipulate future inflation expectations. We show that adaptive learning imposes a more restrictive constraint on monetary policy robustness to ensure the dynamic stability of the equilibrium than under rational expectations but strengthens the argument in favor of a more aggressive monetary policy when the central bank fears for model misspecifications.
Using a New Keynesian model subject to misspecifications, we examine the accountability issue in a framework of delegation where government and private agents are uncertain about the central bank's preference for model robustness. We show that, in the benchmark case of full transparency, the optimal inflation targeting weight (or penalty) is decreasing with the preference for robustness. Departing from the benchmark equilibrium, the central bank has then incentive to be less transparent in order to reduce the optimal inflation targeting weight and thus to become more independent vis‐à‐vis the government. We also find that greater opacity will increase the sensibility of inflation and model misspecification to the inflation shock but will decrease that of output‐gap. Since macroeconomic volatility could be increased or decreased under more opacity, there could exist in some cases a trade‐off between the level and the variability of inflation (and output gap). Persistent inflation shocks could be associated with a higher inflation targeting weight as well as a higher sensibility of inflation and output gap to the inflation shock but a lower sensibility of model misspecification.
Using a macroeconomic model with asset prices, we analyze how optimal monetary policy and macroeconomic dynamics and performance are affected by a central bank's desire to be robust against model misspecifications. We show that a higher central bank preference for robustness implies a more aggressive reaction of the nominal interest rate to the expected future inflation rate and inflation shocks. The dynamic stability of the equilibrium is not modified for a sufficiently high preference for robustness. However, the speed of dynamic convergence is lower under robust control compared to a benchmark case without it and implies supplementary economic costs. Finally, an increase in the preference for robustness comes at the cost of higher macroeconomic and financial volatility in the presence of inflation shocks. It has no effect on the reaction of inflation, output gap, and asset price gap to shocks affecting goods and financial markets.
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