IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/moneco/v56y2009isps1-s18.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Monetary policy and aggregate volatility

Author

Listed:
  • Adam, Klaus

Abstract

Discretionary conduct of monetary stabilization policy can increase real and nominal aggregate volatility by arbitrary amounts when firms pay limited attention to aggregate shocks. A conservative central banker with stronger preference for price stability eliminates the commitment problem, thereby reduces output and price volatility and gives rise to a policy-induced ‘Great Moderation’. Increased focus on price stability facilitates firms’ information processing and aligns their expectations better with policy decisions. This ‘coordination effect’ reduces aggregate real and nominal volatility. Consistent with empirical evidence, the moderation manifests itself through reduced residual variance in vector autoregressions (VARs) involving macroeconomic variables.

Suggested Citation

  • Adam, Klaus, 2009. "Monetary policy and aggregate volatility," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(S), pages 1-18.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:moneco:v:56:y:2009:i:s:p:s1-s18
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jmoneco.2009.06.008
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439320900083X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2009.06.008?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Richard Clarida & Jordi Galí & Mark Gertler, 2000. "Monetary Policy Rules and Macroeconomic Stability: Evidence and Some Theory," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(1), pages 147-180.
    2. Luca Gambetti & Jordi Galí, 2009. "On the Sources of the Great Moderation," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 1(1), pages 26-57, January.
    3. Laurence Ball & David Romer, 1990. "Real Rigidities and the Non-Neutrality of Money," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 57(2), pages 183-203.
    4. anonymous, 2007. "In Atlanta, Bernanke discusses monetary policy, finance," Financial Update, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, vol. 20(3).
    5. Orphanides, Athanasios & Williams, John C., 2005. "The decline of activist stabilization policy: Natural rate misperceptions, learning, and expectations," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 29(11), pages 1927-1950, November.
    6. Olivier Blanchard & John Simon, 2001. "The Long and Large Decline in U.S. Output Volatility," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 32(1), pages 135-174.
    7. Canova, Fabio & Gambetti, Luca, 2009. "Structural changes in the US economy: Is there a role for monetary policy?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 477-490, February.
    8. Adam, Klaus, 2007. "Optimal monetary policy with imperfect common knowledge," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 267-301, March.
    9. Reis, Ricardo, 2006. "Inattentive consumers," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(8), pages 1761-1800, November.
    10. Lucas, Robert E, Jr, 1973. "Some International Evidence on Output-Inflation Tradeoffs," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 63(3), pages 326-334, June.
    11. Frank Smets & Rafael Wouters, 2007. "Shocks and Frictions in US Business Cycles: A Bayesian DSGE Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 586-606, June.
    12. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2003. "Has the Business Cycle Changed and Why?," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2002, Volume 17, pages 159-230, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Giorgio E. Primiceri, 2005. "Time Varying Structural Vector Autoregressions and Monetary Policy," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 72(3), pages 821-852.
    14. Sims, Christopher A., 2003. "Implications of rational inattention," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 665-690, April.
    15. Ricardo Reis, 2006. "Inattentive Producers," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(3), pages 793-821.
    16. Kenneth Rogoff, 1985. "The Optimal Degree of Commitment to an Intermediate Monetary Target," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 100(4), pages 1169-1189.
    17. Moscarini, Giuseppe, 2004. "Limited information capacity as a source of inertia," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 28(10), pages 2003-2035, September.
    18. James Bullard & George W. Evans & Seppo Honkapohja, 2008. "Monetary Policy, Judgment, and Near-Rational Exuberance," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(3), pages 1163-1177, June.
    19. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2003. "Has the business cycle changed?," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 9-56.
    20. Christopher A. Sims & Tao Zha, 2006. "Were There Regime Switches in U.S. Monetary Policy?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 54-81, March.
    21. Margaret M. McConnell & Gabriel Perez-Quiros, 2000. "Output fluctuations in the United States: what has changed since the early 1980s?," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Mar.
    22. Jean Boivin & Marc P. Giannoni, 2006. "Has Monetary Policy Become More Effective?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 88(3), pages 445-462, August.
    23. Lucas, Robert Jr., 1972. "Expectations and the neutrality of money," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 4(2), pages 103-124, April.
    24. Vestin, David, 2006. "Price-level versus inflation targeting," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(7), pages 1361-1376, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gaballo, Gaetano, 2013. "Good luck or good policy? An expectational theory of macro volatility switches," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(12), pages 2755-2770.
    2. repec:fce:doctra:13-04 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Paul Hubert, 2015. "ECB Projections as a Tool for Understanding Policy Decisions," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(7), pages 574-587, November.
    4. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/79hle3i1b69dqrocqsjarh6lb1 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Paul Hubert, 2015. "ECB Projections as a Tool for Understanding Policy Decisions," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(7), pages 574-587, November.
    6. Leonardo Melosi, 2017. "Signalling Effects of Monetary Policy," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(2), pages 853-884.
    7. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/79hle3i1b69dqrocqsjarh6lb1 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Pasten, Ernesto & Schoenle, Raphael, 2016. "Rational inattention, multi-product firms and the neutrality of money," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 1-16.
    9. Mankiw, N. Gregory & Reis, Ricardo, 2010. "Imperfect Information and Aggregate Supply," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: Benjamin M. Friedman & Michael Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 5, pages 183-229, Elsevier.
    10. Lena Draeger, 2011. "Endogenous persistence with recursive inattentiveness," KOF Working papers 11-285, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
    11. Stefan Collignon, 2024. "The Tale of Two Economies: Inflationary Dynamics in the Euro Area and the US in the Context of Uncertainty," Economies, MDPI, vol. 12(7), pages 1-27, June.
    12. McNown, Robert & Seip, Knut Lehre, 2011. "Periods and structural breaks in US economic history 1959-2007," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 169-182, March.
    13. Macaulay, Alistair, 2021. "The attention trap: Rational inattention, inequality, and fiscal policy," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    14. Paul Hubert & Becky Maule, 2016. "Policy and Macro Signals as Inputs to Inflation Expectation Formation," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-03459462, HAL.
    15. Fang Zhang, 2017. "Rational Inattention in Uncertain Business Cycles," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 49(1), pages 215-253, February.
    16. Zhang, Fang, 2014. "Monetary policy for rationally inattentive economies with staggered price setting," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 184-208.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. William A. Branch & John Carlson & George W. Evans & Bruce McGough, 2009. "Monetary Policy, Endogenous Inattention and the Volatility Trade‐off," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 119(534), pages 123-157, January.
    2. Fabio Canova & Luca Gambetti, 2010. "Do Expectations Matter? The Great Moderation Revisited," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(3), pages 183-205, July.
    3. Benoit Mojon, 2007. "Monetary policy, output composition and the Great Moderation," Working Paper Series WP-07-07, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    4. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Pablo Guerrón-Quintana & Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez, 2010. "Fortune or Virtue: Time-Variant Volatilities Versus Parameter Drifting in U.S. Data," NBER Working Papers 15928, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Qazi Haque, 2022. "Monetary Policy, Inflation Target, and the Great Moderation: An Empirical Investigation," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 18(4), pages 1-52, October.
    6. Canova, Fabio & Ferroni, Filippo, 2012. "The dynamics of US inflation: Can monetary policy explain the changes?," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 167(1), pages 47-60.
    7. Andre Kurmann & Julien Champagne, 2010. "The Great Increase in Relative Volatility of Real Wages in the United States," 2010 Meeting Papers 674, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    8. Mayer, Eric & Scharler, Johann, 2011. "Noisy information, interest rate shocks and the Great Moderation," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 568-581.
    9. Firmin Doko Tchatoka & Qazi Haque, 2024. "Revisiting the Macroeconomic Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 100(329), pages 234-259, June.
    10. Qureshi, Irfan, 2015. "Monetary Policy Shifts and Central Bank Independence," MPRA Paper 81646, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Sep 2017.
    11. Castelnuovo, Efrem, 2010. "Trend inflation and macroeconomic volatilities in the post-WWII U.S. economy," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 19-33, March.
    12. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/f4rshpf3v1umfa09lat09b1bg is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Paul Hubert, 2010. "Monetary policy, imperfect information and the expectations channel [Politique monétaire,information imparfaite et canal des anticipations]," SciencePo Working papers Main tel-04095385, HAL.
    14. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/f4rshpf3v1umfa09lat09b1bg is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Baele, Lieven & Bekaert, Geert & Cho, Seonghoon & Inghelbrecht, Koen & Moreno, Antonio, 2015. "Macroeconomic regimes," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 51-71.
    16. Canova, Fabio & Gambetti, Luca, 2009. "Structural changes in the US economy: Is there a role for monetary policy?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 477-490, February.
    17. Ana Beatriz Galvão & Liudas Giraitis & George Kapetanios & Katerina Petrova, 2015. "A Bayesian Local Likelihood Method for Modelling Parameter Time Variation in DSGE Models," Working Papers 770, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    18. repec:spo:wpecon:info:hdl:2441/f4rshpf3v1umfa09lat09b1bg is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Pancrazi, Roberto, 2015. "The heterogeneous Great Moderation," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 207-228.
    20. Dimitris Korobilis, 2013. "Assessing the Transmission of Monetary Policy Using Time-varying Parameter Dynamic Factor Models-super-," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 75(2), pages 157-179, April.
    21. Emanuele Bacchiocchi & Efrem Castelnuovo & Luca Fanelli, 2014. "Gimme a break! Identification and estimation of the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy shocks in the U.S," "Marco Fanno" Working Papers 0181, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno".
    22. Belongia, Michael T. & Ireland, Peter N., 2016. "The evolution of U.S. monetary policy: 2000–2007," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 78-93.
    23. Domenico Giannone & Michele Lenza & Lucrezia Reichlin, 2008. "Explaining The Great Moderation: It Is Not The Shocks," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(2-3), pages 621-633, 04-05.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Great moderation; Optimal monetary policy; Rational inattention;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:moneco:v:56:y:2009:i:s:p:s1-s18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505566 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.
    pFad - Phonifier reborn

    Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

    Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


    Alternative Proxies:

    Alternative Proxy

    pFad Proxy

    pFad v3 Proxy

    pFad v4 Proxy