Jarkko P. Jääskelä

A Medium-Scale New Keynesian Open Economy Model of Australia

We estimate a new Keynesian open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of Australia with a large number of shocks, frictions and rigidities, matching a large number of observable time series. We find that both foreign and domestic shocks are important drivers of the Australian business cycle. We also find that the initial impact on inflation of an increase in demand for Australian commodities is negative, because of an improvement in the real exchange rate, although there is a persistent positive effect on inflation that dominates at longer horizons.

Terms of Trade Shocks: What are They and What Do They Do?

This paper describes and quantifies the macroeconomic effects of different types of terms of trade shocks and their propagation in the Australian economy. Three types of shocks are identified based on their impact on commodity prices, global manufactured prices, and global economic activity. The first two shocks, a world demand shock and a commodity-market specific shock are fairly standard. The third shock, a globalisation shock that may result, for instance, from the increasing importance of China, India and eastern Europe in the global economy is more novel. The globalisation shock is associated with a decline in manufactured prices, a rise in commodity prices, and an increase in global economic activity. Determining the underlying source of variation in the terms of trade is shown to be important for understanding the impact on the Australian economy as all three shocks propagate through the economy in different ways. The relative contribution of each shock to inflation, output, interest rates, and the exchange rate has also varied over time. The main conclusion of the paper is that a higher terms of trade tends to be expansionary but is not always inflationary. A key result is that the floating exchange rate has provided an important buffer to the external shocks that move the terms of trade.

Measuring the Euro Exchange Rate Risk Premium: The Conditional International CAPM Approach

This paper derives measures for the bilateral euro exchange rate risk premia vis-a-vis the US dollar and the UK pound sterling, as well as the US and the UK equity market risk premia using the perspective of a european investor. We carry out the estimations applying the conditional International Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM). The ICAPM is estimated for both constant and time-varying prices of risk, using weekly data on the equity and foreign exchange returns for Europe, the UK and the US. In estimating the time-varying prices of risk, we propose a new set of instrumental variables that take both business cycle and market volatility considerations into account. Consequently, our risk premium estimates are more intuitive, picking up most of the individual events that moved the markets between 1986 and 2001.

Monetary policy and data uncertainty

One of the problems facing policymakers is that recent releases of data are liable to subsequent revisions. This paper discusses how to deal with this, and is in two parts. In the normative part of the paper, we study the design of monetary policy rules in a model that has the feature that data uncertainty varies according to the vintage. We show how coefficients on lagged variables in optimised simple rules for monetary policy increase as the relative measurement error in early vintages of data increases. We also explore scenarios when policymakers are uncertain by how much measurement error in new data exceeds that in old data. An optimal policy can then be one in which it is better to assume that the ratio of measurement error in new compared to old data is larger, rather than smaller. In the positive part of the paper, we show that the response of monetary policy to vintage varying data uncertainty may generate evidence of apparent interest rate smoothing in interest rate reaction functions: but we suggest that it may not generate enough to account for what has been observed in the data.

Inflation Volatility and Forecast Accuracy

This paper examines the statistical properties of inflation in a sample of inflation-targeting and non-inflation-targeting countries. First, it analyses the time-varying volatility of a measure of the persistent component of inflation. Based on this measure, inflation-targeting countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom) have experienced a relatively more pronounced fall in the volatility of inflation than non-inflation-targeting countries (Austria, France, Germany, Japan and the United States). But it is hard to say whether inflation is more volatile in inflation-targeting or non-inflation-targeting countries. Second, it analyses whether inflation became easier to forecast after the introduction of inflation targeting. It finds that inflation became easier to forecast in both inflation-targeting and non-inflation-targeting countries; the improvement was greater for the former group but forecast errors remain smaller for the latter group.

Monetary Policy and Private Sector Misperceptions About the Natural Level of Output

In this paper we illustrate, using a simple model of monetary policy, the welfare costs of the private sector and/or the central bank being uncertain about the natural level of output. It turns out that monetary policy strategies that put less weight on output stabilisation can offset some of these welfare costs.

Fundamental inflation uncertainty

We develop a method of quantifying the uncertainty surrounding the estimates of the fundamental inflation implied by the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). The uncertainty is represented as a band around the fundamental inflation, and encompasses the sampling uncertainty of both the estimates of the structural parameters and the estimates of the VAR used to form a projection of real marginal costs. An empirical application on UK and US data confirms that fundamental inflation tracks actual inflation reasonably well in both countries. For the United Kingdom the confidence band is sufficiently narrow, relative to the sample variance of inflation, to identify a number of periods where the predictions of the NKPC do not fully capture movements in actual inflation. In contrast, considerable uncertainty surrounds the estimates of fundamental inflation for the United States.