Marek Rusnák

Cross-Country Heterogeneity in Intertemporal Substitution

We collect 2,735 estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption from 169 published studies that cover 104 countries during different time periods. The estimates vary substantially from country to country, even after controlling for 30 aspects of study design. Our results suggest that income and asset market participation are the most effective factors in explaining the heterogeneity: households in developing countries and countries with low stock market participation substitute a smaller fraction of consumption intertemporally in response to changes in expected asset returns. Micro-level studies that focus on sub-samples of poor households or households not participating in asset markets also find systematically smaller values of the elasticity.

How to Solve the Price Puzzle? A Meta-Analysis

The short-run increase in prices following an unexpected tightening of monetary policy represents a frequently reported puzzle. Yet the puzzle is easy to explain away when all published models are quantitatively reviewed. We collect and examine about 1,000 point estimates of impulse responses from 70 articles using vector autoregressive models to study monetary transmission in various countries. We find some evidence of publication selection against the price puzzle in the literature, but our results also suggest that the reported puzzle is mostly caused by model misspecifications. Finally, the long-run response of prices to monetary policy shocks depends on the characteristics of the economy.

Transmission Lags of Monetary Policy: A Meta-Analysis

The transmission of monetary policy to the economy is generally thought to have long and variable lags. In this paper we quantitatively review the modern literature on monetary transmission to provide stylized facts on the average lag length and the sources of variability. We collect sixty-seven published studies and examine when prices bottom out after a monetary contraction. The average transmission lag is twenty-nine months, and the maximum decrease in prices reaches 0.9 percent on average after a 1-percentage-point hike in the policy rate. Transmission lags are longer in developed economies (twenty-five to fifty months) than in post-transition economies (ten to twenty months). We find that the factor most effective in explaining this heterogeneity is financial development: greater financial development is associated with slower transmission.

How Important Are Foreign Shocks in Small Open Economy? The Case of Slovakia

In this paper, we provide evidence on the nature and the relative importance of domestic and foreign shocks in Slovak economy based on block-restriction vector autoregression model in 1999-2007. We document well-functioning monetary transmission mechanism in Slovakia. Subject to various sensitivity checks, we find that contractionary monetary policy shock has a temporary negative effect on the degree of economic activity and price level. We find that using output gap instead of GDP alleviates the price puzzle. In general, prices are driven mainly by foreign factors and the European Central Bank monetary policy shock on Slovak prices is more powerful than that of the National Bank of Slovakia. Slovak central bank interest rate policy seems to follow the ECB???s interest rates. On the other hand, spectacular Slovak economic growth is primarily driven by domestic factors suggesting the positive role of recently undertaken Slovak economic reforms.

The dissent voting behaviour of central bankers: what do we really know?

We examine the determinants of the dissent in central bank boards voting records about monetary policy rates in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, the UK and the US. In contrast to previous studies, we consider 25 different macroeconomic, financial, institutional, psychological or preference-related factors jointly and use Bayesian model averaging (BMA) to formally assess the attendant model uncertainty. We find that the rate of dissent is between 5% and 20% for the examined central banks. Our results suggest that most of the examined regressors, including factors that capture the effects of inflation and output, are not robust determinants of voting dissent. This result suggests that unobserved characteristics of central bankers and different communication strategies drive the dissent, rather than the level of macroeconomic uncertainty.

Comparing Different Early Warning Systems: Results from a Horse Race Competition Among Members of the Macro-Prudential Research Network

Over the recent decades researchers in academia and central banks have developed early warning systems (EWS) designed to warn policy makers of potential future economic and financial crises. These EWS are based on diverse approaches and empirical models. In this paper we compare the performance of nine distinct models for predicting banking crises resulting from the work of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs) initiated by the European System of Central Banks. In order to ensure comparability, all models use the same database of crises created by MaRs and comparable sets of potential early warning indicators. We evaluate the models’ relative usefulness by comparing the ratios of false alarms and missed crises and discuss implications for pratical use and future research. We find that multivariate models, in their many appearances, have great potential added value over simple signalling models. One of the main policy recommendations coming from this exercise is that policy makers can benefit from taking a broad methodological approach when they develop models to set macro-prudential instruments.