Essays On Monetary Policy With Informational Frictions

Lastly, I show the optimal monetary policy is rule-based Odyssean forward guidance, which is a state-contingent commitment that specifies how the central bank reacts to both the actual shock and the noise in its own information.

The dissertation, which consists of two chapters, is devoted to exploring the role of informational friction in monetary economics and finance.Chapter I: COUNTERFEITING, SCREENING AND GOVERNMENT POLICY.In this chapter, I construct a search theoretic model of money in which counterfeit money can be produced at a cost but agents can screen for fake money also at a cost. Counterfeiting can occur in equilibrium when both costs and the inflation rate are sufficiently low. Optimal monetary policy is the Friedman rule. However, the rationale for the Friedman rule in an economy with the circulation of counterfeit money differs from the conventional mechanism that holds in the model when counterfeiting does not occur. I also study optimal anti-counterfeiting policy that determines the counterfeiting cost and the screening cost.Chapter II: CENTRAL BANK PURCHASES OF PRIVATE ASSETS: AN EVALUATIONIn this chapter, I develop a model of asset exchange and monetary policy, augmented to incorporate a housing market and a frictional financial market. Homeowners take out mortgages with banks using their residential properties as collateral to finance consumption. Banks use mortgages and government liabilities as collateral to secure deposit contracts, but they have an incentive to fake the quality of mortgages at a cost. Quantitative easing (QE) in the form of central bank purchases of mortgages from private banks has effects on the composition of assets in the economy, and on the incentive structure of the private sector. When the incentive problem is severe, the central bank can unambiguously improve welfare by purchasing mortgages. However, when it is not severe, the central bank's mortgage purchases cause a housing construction boom and sometimes can lower exchange in the economy, hence reducing welfare.

This dissertation consists of four chapters analyzing the effects of heterogeneous and asymmetric information in macroeconomic and financial settings, with an emphasis on short-run fluctuations. Within these chapters, I study the implications these informational frictions may have for the behavior of firms and financial institutions over the business cycle and during crises episodes. The first chapter examines how collateral constraints on firm-level investment introduce a powerful two-way feedback between the financial market and the real economy. On one hand, real economic activity forms the basis for asset dividends. On the other hand, asset prices affect collateral value, which in turn determines the ability of firms to invest. In this chapter I show how this two-way feedback can generate significant expectations-driven fluctuations in asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes when information is dispersed. In particular, I study the implications of this two-way feedback within a micro-founded business-cycle economy in which agents are imperfectly, and heterogeneously, informed about the underlying economic fundamentals. I then show how tighter collateral constraints mitigate the impact of productivity shocks on equilibrium output and asset prices, but amplify the impact of "noise", by which I mean common errors in expectations. Noise can thus be an important source of asset-price volatility and business-cycle fluctuations when collateral constraints are tight. The second chapter is based on joint work with George-Marios Angeletos. In this chapter we investigate a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and-potentially-shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the response of macroeconomic outcomes to such shocks; (ii) induce a negative short-run response of employment to productivity shocks; (iii) imply that productivity shocks explain only a small fraction of high-frequency fluctuations; (iv) contribute to significant noise in the business cycle; (v) formalize a certain type of demand shocks within an RBC economy; and (vi) generate cyclical variation in observed Solow residuals and labor wedges. Importantly, none of these properties requires significant uncertainty about the underlying fundamentals: they rest on the heterogeneity of information and the strength of trade linkages in the economy, not the level of uncertainty. Finally, none of these properties are symptoms of inefficiency: apart from undoing monopoly distortions or providing the agents with more information, no policy intervention can improve upon the equilibrium allocations. The third chapter is also based on joint work with George-Marios Angeletos. This chapter investigates how incomplete information affects the response of prices to nominal shocks. Our baseline model is a variant of the Calvo model in which firms observe the underlying nominal shocks with noise. In this model, the response of prices is pinned down by three parameters: the precision of available information about the nominal shock; the frequency of price adjustment; and the degree of strategic complementarity in pricing decisions. This result synthesizes the broader lessons of the pertinent literature. However, this synthesis provides only a partial view of the role of incomplete information: once one allows for more general information structures than those used in previous work, one cannot quantify the degree of price inertia without additional information about the dynamics of higher-order beliefs, or of the agents' forecasts of inflation. We highlight this with three extensions of our baseline model, all of which break the tight connection between the precision of information and higher-order beliefs featured in previous work. Finally, the fourth chapter studies how predatory trading affects the ability of banks and large trading institutions to raise capital in times of temporary financial distress in an environment in which traders are asymmetrically informed about each others' balance sheets. Predatory trading is a strategy in which a trader can profit by trading against another trader's position, driving an otherwise solvent but distressed trader into insolvency. The predator, however, must be sufficiently informed of the distressed trader's balance sheet in order to exploit this position. I find that when a distressed trader is more informed than other traders about his own balances, searching for extra capital from lenders can become a signal of financial need, thereby opening the door for predatory trading and possible insolvency. Thus, a trader who would otherwise seek to recapitalize is reluctant to search for extra capital in the presence of potential predators. Predatory trading may therefore make it exceedingly difficult for banks and financial institutions to raise credit in times of temporary financial distress.

This dissertation consists of three chapters related to questions in macroeconomics and information frictions. In the first chapter, I relax the complete information assumption in the standard New Keynesian framework to show how the stance of monetary policy can affect the non-fundamental composition of fluctuations, introducing a novel trade-off between stabilizing output and inflation. A strong response to inflation increases the variance of non-fundamental fluctuations. In the second chapter, I study the opti-mal design of monetary policy in the presence of nominal and informational frictions. Non-fundamental fluctuations are shown to be suboptimal. The Taylor rule is no longer sufficient to rule out indeterminacy. Instead, a more lax response to inflation eliminates non-fundamental fluctuations and hence the output-inflation tradeoff. In the third chap-ter, I provide evidence that shocks to sentiments and uncertainty as identified in the literature are correlated and may not be truly structural.

This dissertation examines how information and financial frictions impact firms' investment decisions and shape the effectiveness of monetary policy. The first chapter studies the response of high and low credit quality firms to expansionary monetary shocks. According to the findings, high credit quality firms respond to an expansionary shock by increasing their investment, inventory, and sales, whereas low credit quality firms experience a decrease in these variables. Moreover, their financing behavior differs, with high credit quality firms raising funds through equity while low credit quality firms are unable to issue equity or debt. To provide a theoretical explanation for these findings, a simple model is constructed with two types of firms: financially constrained firms and unconstrained firms. Financially constrained firms face a trade-off in allocating their limited funds between wage payments and investment, while unconstrained firms have greater financial flexibility. As a result of an expansionary shock, an increase in wages affects constrained firms disproportionately, leading them to cut their investment to cover the additional labor costs. Furthermore, constrained firms, due to their limited collateral, have to reduce their debt, which aligns with the empirical observations. The second chapter examines the interaction between information and financial frictions and its implications for the investment channel of monetary policy. In a model with inattentive firms facing financial frictions, constrained firms are more attentive to monetary policy as they attempt to avoid financial costs, creating a new channel for financial frictions to affect price rigidity. Since the level of price rigidity is one of the determinants of the outcome of the monetary policy, the model suggests that the investment channel of monetary policy hinges on the interaction between financial frictions and rational inattention. The research provides empirical evidence that supports the predictions of the model. Firstly, the study uses firms' expectation surveys and, taking size as a proxy for financial constraint, finds that smaller firms have more precise nowcasts and forecasts of aggregate variables. Additionally, these firms are more willing to pay for professional forecasts. Secondly, the research employs firms' balance sheet data and a proxy for aggregate attentiveness to demonstrate that higher information rigidity leads to a sluggish and dampened aggregate investment response to monetary shocks, as predicted by the model. The third chapter finds that a contractionary monetary shock would increase the number of defaults and the aggregate liability of defaulted firms in the economy. Using a DSGE model with financial intermediaries, I show that a higher rate of default negatively impacts the balance sheets of banks and leads to a decrease in the supply of credit and a rise in the interest rate of loans. This further increases the cost of production, forcing more firms to file for bankruptcy. The study demonstrates that monetary policy can effectively dampen this amplification mechanism by considering the default rate in the policy rule, thereby ensuring a more stable economic environment

This thesis consists of three chapters on Economic Growth and Informational Frictions. Chapter 1 investigates the relation between financial development, R&D expenditure and aggregate growth. It provides empirical evidence that financial development has a large positive effect on both growth and R&D, and that the effect of financial development on growth is likely to be explained by its effect on R&D. I also study a general equilibrium model in with predictions which are consistent with the empirical regularities mentioned above. In particular, aggregate growth increases as financial development increases. The model also predicts that financial development produces large welfare gains, specially at low levels of financial development. Finally I show that the model studied suggests that R&D policy is welfare improving and that policy should be conditional on the level of financial development. Chapter 2 gives an empirical assessment of the world income distribution. In particular, I take a CES production function implied by a Skill-Biased technical change model and fit this production function to the data. The calibration results give evidence of the importance of including different skills to account for the observed income differences over time. I also show that the calibration exercise is validated by the estimated values of the parameters of the model. In Chapter 3 I study a model of entry under uncertainty. In particular, I analyze an economy where potential entrants make entry decisions after receiving noisy signals of the true demand levels for the different sectors of the economy. I show that equilibrium strategies depend on the precision of the signals received by agents. When precision is low the equilibrium of the game is a pure strategy equilibrium where agents enter the sector for which they receive a higher signal. On the other hand when precision is high the optimal strategy is to randomize over which sector to enter. The model also highlights the non-monotonic relations between the discrepancy between the equilibrium and efficient entry levels and both the precision of the signal and the true relative demand between sectors.

The thesis consists of three studies on money, banking and monetary policy with modern monetary economic theory based on explicit micro-foundations. As an introduction to the approach adopted by micro-founded monetary theory, the introductory chapter demonstrates the roles of money and capital in a quasi-linear environment with explicit informational frictions. When capital serves as the only record-keeping device, there could be two possible stationary equilibria: one is first-best and the other is not. In a suboptimal equilibrium, consumers are constrained by their capital rental income. Introducing fiat money, a better record-keeping technology with higher rate of return, can improve welfare by relaxing the liquidity constraint. Chapter 2 studies the role of banking in financing investment. It is revealed that banking can mitigate underinvestment, raise capital-labour ratio, and improve welfare; and this effect is greatest under moderate inflation. In Chapter 3, I introduce a record-keeping cost related to bank borrowing, and study the effects of such a banking cost on economic allocations and welfare, as well as its monetary policy implications. Main findings are: Costly banking emerges endogenously only with relatively high inflation and/or relatively low banking cost; the existence of costly banking may improve or reduce welfare relative to the case without banking; with higher inflation rate or banking cost, more people would choose not to deal with banks, which means larger welfare loss; inflation is less harmful with banking than without banking. In Chapter 4, I investigate the trade-off between distribution effect and production effect of monetary policy with presence of idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. When liquidity shocks are observable, a type-contingent money transfer policy can desirably redistribute purchasing power among consumers. When the shocks are unobservable, an illiquid bond policy restores credit transactions on money through bond-money exchanges. Both policies have positive distribution effect, but the resulting inflation hampers production efficiency. I derive a sufficient condition under which the overall welfare can be improved by an inflationary monetary policy: if consumers are relative-risk-averse enough, the trade-off between distribution efficiency gain and production efficiency loss would result in net welfare enhancement.

The objective of this dissertation is to understand the role of financial frictions in the transmission of shocks and their effect on the monetary policy transmission mechanism. To accomplish the task, we develop Dynamic Stochastic General equilibrium models with financial frictions. In the first chapter, we develop a model to analytically determine the appropriate price index to target in the presence of financial frictions (where a fraction of households are constrained to consume their wage income each period). The analysis suggests that in the presence of financial frictions, a welfare-maximizing central bank should adopt flexible headline inflation targeting-i.e. a headline inflation target but with some weight on the output gap. These results are particularly relevant for emerging markets, where the share of food expenditures in total consumption expenditures is high and a large proportion of consumers are credit constrained. In the second chapter, we develop a small open economy model with macrofinancial linkages. The model includes a financial accelerator - entrepreneurs are assumed to partially finance investment using domestic and foreign currency debt - to assess the importance of financial frictions in the amplification and propagation of the effects of transitory shocks to productivity, interest rates and net worth of firms. We use Bayesian estimation techniques to estimate the model using India data. The model is used to assess the importance of the financial accelerator in India and to assess the optimality of the current monetary policy rule. In the third chapter, we develop a small open economy New Keynesian model with financial frictions and an active banking sector for India. We find that the presence of a monopolistic banking sector with sticky interest rate setting attenuates the shocks. However, if the interest rates are flexible it results in the amplification of shocks. We also find that an unexpected reduction in bank capital can have a substantial impact on the real economy and particularly on investment. Use of nonmonetary policy tools result in greater volatility as compared to when central banks use traditional monetary tightening.

This dissertation consists of three essays on monetary policy and asset prices. The first chapter proposes a novel methodology to disentangle in real-time the signaling effect of a Fed announcement from exogenous monetary shocks. The method relies on the different ways monetary news and non-monetary news change the short end of the yield curve at high frequency, with the latter informed by market responses to macroeconomic data releases. The estimated revelation of Fed information is strongly correlated with the difference between market forecasts and the Fed's own forecasts. The policy shock is found to have a bigger effect on the economy than suggested using an instrument without adjustment for the signaling effect. The second chapter studies the structural forces driving the financial market responses to data releases and Fed announcements. I estimate a coherent, realistic framework that prices Treasury bonds based on macroeconomic fundamentals. The framework explicitly recognizes agents' information frictions in regard to contemporaneous aggregate outcomes, successfully matches the market responses to macroeconomic events and sheds light on the nature of news learned by investors at various events. The third chapter proposes a state-space approach to decomposing a stock's idiosyncratic volatility into a common component and an idiosyncratic one. The measure of the common idiosyncratic volatility is persistent at the daily frequency. It accounts for idiosyncratic volatilities in sample better than GARCH(1,1) and a principal component approach. It also forecasts the future levels of idiosyncratic volatilities better than GARCH(1,1) in the medium- to long-run. I assess its pricing implication in the cross section of stock returns.