Peter A. Tinsley

Monetary Policy When the Nominal Short-Term Interest Rate is Zero

In an environment of low inflation, the Federal Reserve faces the possibility that it may not have provided enough monetary stimulus even though it had pushed the short-term nominal interest rate to its lower bound of zero. Assuming the nominal Treasury-bill rate had been lowered to zero, this paper considers whether further open market purchases of Treasury bills could spur aggregate demand through increases in the monetary base. Such action may be stimulative by increasing liquidity for financial intermediaries and households; by affecting expectations of the future paths of short-term interest rates, inflation, and asset prices; through distributional effects; or by stimulating bank lending through the credit channel. This paper also examines the alternative policy tools that are available to the Federal Reserve in theory, and notes the practical limitations imposed by the Federal Reserve Act. The tools the Federal Reserve has at its disposal include open market purchases of Treasury bonds and certain types of private-sector credit instruments; unsterilized and sterilized intervention in foreign exchange; lending through the discount window; and, in some circumstances, may include the use of options.

Alternative Sources of the Lag Dynamics of Inflation

Data on credit ratings by the agencies with the legal status of Nationally-Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSROs) show some tendency for one-day downgrades that start from the lowest investment grade, BBB-, to travel more grades than those from neighboring grades. This would be consistent with the lower threshold of the NRSROs’ grade BBB- being at a substantial default probability, but also could occur simply because downgrades to junk severely impair some firms’ operations. A comparison of data from a non-NRSRO agency and an NRSRO shows that the latter’s regrades from BBB moved in the direction of the non-NRSRO’s earlier ratings. This suggests the non-NRSRO defines its grade BBB- more narrowly than the NRSRO.

Permanent and transitory policy shocks in an empirical macro model with asymmetric information

Despite a large literature documenting that the efficacy of monetary policy depends on how inflation expectations are anchored, many monetary policy models assume: (1) the inflation target of monetary policy is constant; and, (2) the inflation target is known by all economic agents. This paper proposes an empirical specification with two policy shocks: permanent changes to the inflation target and transitory perturbations of the short-term real rate. The public sector cannot correctly distinguish between these two shocks and, under incomplete learning, private perceptions of the inflation target will not equal the true target. The paper shows how imperfect policy credibility can affect economic responses to structural shocks, including transition to a new inflation target - a question that cannot be addressed by many commonly used empirical and theoretical models. In contrast to models where all monetary policy actions are transient, the proposed specification implies that sizable movements in historical bond yields and inflation are attributable to perceptions of permanent shocks in target inflation.

Survey-Based Estimates of the Term Structure of Expected U.S. Inflation

Surveys provide direct information on expectations, but only short histories are available at quarterly frequencies or for long-horizon expectations. Longer histories typically contain only semi-annual observations of short-horizon forecasts. The authors fill in the gaps by constructing a 50-year monthly history of expected inflation at all horizons from one month to 10 years that is consistent with inflation data and infrequent survey data. In the process, some models that fit inflation well are found to generate forecasts that bear little resemblance to survey data. Also, survey data on near-term expectations are found to contain considerable information about long-horizon views. The estimated long-horizon forecast series, a measure of the private sector’s perception of the inflation target of monetary policy, has shifted considerably over time and is the source of some of the persistence of inflation. When compared with estimates of the effective inflation goal of policy, these perceptions suggest that monetary policy has been less than fully credible historically.

Perhaps the FOMC did what it said it did : an alternative interpretation of the Great Inflation

This paper uses real-time briefing forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to provide estimates of historical changes in the design of U.S. monetary policy and in the implied central-bank target for inflation. Empirical results support a description of policy with an effective inflation target of roughly 7 percent in the 1970s. Moreover, the evidence suggests that mismeasurement of the degree of economic slack was largely irrelevant for explaining the Great Inflation while favouring a passive-policy description of monetary policy. FOMC transcripts provide a neglected interpretation of the source of passive policy--intermediate targeting of monetary aggregates.

Term Premia: Endogenous Constraints on Monetary Policy

Monetary policy evaluation using structural macro models suggests that historical monetary policy responds less aggressively to inflation and the output gap than would an optimal policy rule. However, these results are obtained using models with constant term premia. This paper shows how term premia may depend on the policy rule specification and policy rate uncertainty. A more aggressive policy rule involves an economically important increase in term premia. Consequently, conclusions about the specification of optimal monetary policy rules based on counterfactual simulations of models that exclude term premia effects may not be valid.

Smart Systems and Simple Agents: Industry Pricing by Parallel Rules

A standard macroeconomic specification is that the aggregate economy is directed by a single, smart representative agent using optimal decision rules. This paper explores an alternative conjecture--that the dynamic behavior of markets is often better interpreted as the interactions of many heterogeneous, rule-of-thumb agents who are loosely coupled in smart systems--much like the contrast of a single serial processor with global information versus parallel processors with limited communications. The illustration used in this paper is the contrast between a conventional macro model of sluggish adjustments in an aggregate producer price index and a model of delayed industry price adjustments in a distributed production system under costly inter-firm communications.

Smart Systems and Simple Agents

A standard macroeconomic premise asserts that the aggregate economy is a single, smart representative agent using dynamic programming. This paper explores an alternative conjecture that the dynamic behavior of markets is often better interpreted as a collection of many heterogeneous, rule-of-thumb agents who are loosely-coupled in smart systems — much like the contrast of a single serial processor with global information versus parallel processors with limited communications. The illustration used in this paper is the contrast between an Euler equation for a manufacturing producer price index and variants of Jacobi solutions of an open-Leontief model of producer prices in a distributed production system.

Term Structure Transmission of Monetary Policy (Why Bond Traders are Paid More than Central Bankers)

The sensitivity of bond rates to macro variables appears to vary both over time and over forecast horizons. The latter may be due to differences in forward rate term premiums and in bond trader perceptions of anticipated policy responses at different forecast horizons. Determinacy of policy transmission through bond rates requires a lower bound on the average responsiveness of term premiums and anticipated policy responses to inflation.