This book studies the dynamics of monetary and fiscal interactions in the Euro Area. The policy makers are the European Central Bank and national governments. The primary target of the ECB is low inflation. And the primary target of a national government is low unemployment. However, there is a short-run trade-off between low inflation and low unemployment. Here the main focus is on sequential policy decisions. Another focus is on simultaneous and independent policy decisions. And a third focus is on policy cooperation. There are demand shocks, supply shocks, and mixed shocks. There are country-specific shocks and common shocks. The key question is: Given a shock, what are the dynamic characteristics of the resulting process?
The contributors to this text, all economists and scholars, combine theoretical analysis and policy recommendation in their examination of the difficulties of European monetary integration.
This study is concerned with the policy process by which the movement towards closer monetary integration, and the still very uncertain objective of EMU, has been shaped and guided. It asks how this process might be described, and how its emergence and development be can explained.
This paper reviews empirical and theoretical work on the links between banks and their governments (the bank-sovereign nexus). How significant is this nexus? What do we know about it? To what extent is it a source of concern? What is the role of policy intervention? The paper concludes with a review of recent policy proposals.
We provide evidence on the fit of the New Phillips Curve (NPQ for the Euro area over the period 1970-1998, and use it as a tool to compare the characteristics of European inflation dynamics with those observed in the U.S. We also analyze the factors underlying inflation inertia by examining the cyclical behavior of marginal costs, as well as that of its two main components, namely, labor productivity and real wages. Some of the findings can be summarized as follows: (a) the NPC fits Euro area data very well, possibly better than U.S. data, (b) the degree of price stickiness implied by the estimates is substantial, but in line with survey evidence and U.S. estimates, (c) inflation dynamics in the Euro area appear to have a stronger forward- looking component (i.e., less inertia) than in the U.S., (d) labor market frictions, as manifested in the behavior of the wage markup, appear to have played a key role in shaping the behavior of marginal costs and, consequently, inflation in Europe.
Recently, monetary authorities have increasingly focused on implementing policies to ensure price stability and strengthen central bank independence. Simultaneously, in the fiscal area, market development has allowed public debt managers to focus more on cost minimization. This “divorce” of monetary and debt management functions in no way lessens the need for effective coordination of monetary and fiscal policy if overall economic performance is to be optimized and maintained in the long term. This paper analyzes these issues based on a review of the relevant literature and of country experiences from an institutional and operational perspective.
This book studies the strategic policy interactions in a monetary union. The leading protagonists are the European Central Bank and national governments. The target of the ECB is low inflation in Europe. The targets of a national government are low unemployment and a low structural deficit. There are demand shocks, supply shocks, and mixed shocks. There are country-specific shocks and common shocks. This book develops a series of basic, intermediate, and more advanced models. Here the focus is on the Nash equilibrium. The key questions are: Given a shock, can policy interactions reduce the existing loss? And to what extent can they do so? Another topical issue is policy cooperation. To illustrate all of this there are a lot of numerical examples. The present book is part of a larger research project on European Monetary Union, see the references given at the back of the book. Some parts of this project were presented at the World Congress of the International Economic Association, at the International Conference on Macroeconomic Analysis, at the International Institute of Public Finance, and at the International Atlantic Economic Conference. Other parts were presented at the Macro Study Group of the German Economic Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, at the Göttingen Workshop on International Economics, at the Halle Workshop on Monetary Economics, at the Research Seminar on Macroeconomics in Freiburg, at the Research Seminar on Economics in Kassel, and at the Passau Workshop on International Economics.
Bolder economic policy could have addressed the persistent bouts of deflation in post-bubble Japan, write Gene Park, Saori N. Katada, Giacomo Chiozza, and Yoshiko Kojo in Taming Japan's Deflation. Despite warnings from economists, intense political pressure, and well-articulated unconventional policy options to address this problem, Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan (BOJ), resisted taking the bold actions that the authors believe would have significantly helped. With Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's return to power, Japan finally shifted course at the start of 2013 with the launch of Abenomics—an economic agenda to reflate the economy—and Abe's appointment of new leadership at the BOJ. As Taming Japan's Deflation shows, the BOJ's resistance to experimenting with bolder policy stemmed from entrenched policy ideas that were hostile to activist monetary policy. The authors explain how these policy ideas evolved over the course of the BOJ's long history and gained dominance because of the closed nature of the broader policy network. The explanatory power of policy ideas and networks suggests a basic inadequacy in the dominant framework for analysis of the politics of monetary policy derived from the literature on central bank independence. This approach privileges the interaction between political principals and their supposed agents, central bankers; but Taming Japan's Deflation shows clearly that central bankers' views, shaped by ideas and institutions, can be decisive in determining monetary policy. Through a combination of institutional analysis, quantitative empirical tests, in-depth case studies, and structured comparison of Japan with other countries, the authors show that, ultimately, the decision to adopt aggressive monetary policy depends largely on the bankers' established policy ideas and policy network.
We evaluate and partially challenge the ‘household leverage’ view of the Great Recession. In the data, employment and consumption declined more in states where household debt declined more. We study a model where liquidity constraints amplify the response of consumption and employment to changes in debt. We estimate the model with Bayesian methods combining state and aggregate data. Changes in household credit limits explain 40 percent of the differential rise and fall of employment across states, but a small fraction of the aggregate employment decline in 2008-2010. Nevertheless, since household deleveraging was gradual, credit shocks greatly slowed the recovery.
Dynamic game theory serves the purpose of including strategic interaction in decision making and is therefore often applied to economic problems. This book presents the state-of-the-art and directions for future research in dynamic game theory related to economics. It was initiated by contributors to the 12th Viennese Workshop on Optimal Control, Dynamic Games and Nonlinear Dynamics and combines a selection of papers from the workshop with invited papers of high quality.
