Prakash Kannan

Monetary and Macroprudential Policy Rules in a Model with House Price Booms

Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with housing, this paper shows that strong monetary reactions to accelerator mechanisms that push up credit growth and house prices can help macroeconomic stability. In addition, using a macroprudential instrument specifically designed to dampen credit market cycles would also provide stabilization benefits when an economy faces financial sector or housing demand shocks. However, the optimal macroprudential rule under productivity shocks is to not intervene. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the source of house price booms for the design of monetary and macroprudential policy.

Credit Conditions and Recoveries from Recessions Associated with Financial Crises

Recoveries from recessions associated with a financial crisis tend to be sluggish. In this paper, we present evidence that stressed credit conditions are an important factor constraining the pace of recovery. In particular, using industry-level data, we find that industries relying more on external finance grow more slowly than other industries during recoveries from recessions associated with financial crises. Additional tests, based on establishment size, on alternative definitions of financial crises, and on corporate-government interest rate spreads, support the findings. Moreover, for subsets of industries where financial frictions are more severe, we find much stronger differential growth effects.

New Evidence on Cyclical and Structural Sources of Unemployment

We provide cross-country evidence on the relative importance of cyclical and structural factors in explaining unemployment, including the sharp rise in U.S. long-term unemployment during the Great Recession of 2007-09. About 75% of the forecast error variance of unemployment is accounted for by cyclical factors-real GDP changes (?Okun‘s Law?), monetary and fiscal policies, and the uncertainty effects emphasized by Bloom (2009). Structural factors, which we measure using the dispersion of industry-level stock returns, account for the remaining 25 percent. For U.S. long-term unemployment the split between cyclical and structural factors is closer to 60-40, including during the Great Recession.

Macroeconomic Patterns and Monetary Policy in the Run-Up to Asset Price Busts

We find that inflation, output and the stance of monetary policy do not typically display unusual behavior ahead of asset price busts. By contrast, credit, shares of investment in GDP, current account deficits, and asset prices typically rise, providing useful, if not perfect, leading indicators of asset price busts. These patterns could also be observed in the build-up to the current crisis. Monetary policy was not the main, systematic cause of the current crisis. But, with inflation typically under control, central banks effectively accommodated these growing imbalances, raising the risk of damaging busts.

The Uncertainty Channel of Contagion

The 2007 subprime crisis in the United States has triggered a succession of financial crises around the globe, reigniting interest in the contagion phenomenon. Not all crises, however, are contagious. This paper models a new channel of contagion where the degree of anticipation of crises, through its impact on investor uncertainty, determines the occurrence of contagion. Incidences of surprise crises lead investors to doubt the accuracy of their information-gathering technology, which endogenously increases the probability of crises elsewhere. Anticipated crises, instead, have the opposite effect. Importantly, this channel is empirically shown to have an independent effect beyond other contagion channels.

On the welfare benefits of an international currency

Is it beneficial for a countrys currency to be used internationally? And, if so, can we quantify the benefit? Since the emergence of the euro, there has been great interest in the consequences of a transfer of the dollars premier international role to the euro. This paper presents a novel model-based approach towards assessing the welfare benefits associated with the international use of a countrys currency. Apart from the familiar benefits associated with seigniorage, residents of the issuing country experience an increase in the purchasing power of their currency both at home and abroad. In the calibration exercise carried out in this paper, we find the benefits of an international currency to be quantitatively significant. The welfare gain for the Euro area in having the euro internationally used ranges from 1.9% to 2.3% of consumption depending on relative inflation rates. The rest of the world is not indifferent as to which currency circulates as the dominant international currency. Conditional on their currency not being used internationally, their preference is for the dominant international currency to be the one with the lowest inflation rate.

The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks on the UK Economy

This paper quantifies the economic impact of uncertainty shocks in the UK using data that span the recent Great Recession. We find that uncertainty shocks have a significant impact on economic activity in the UK, depressing industrial production and GDP. The peak impact is felt fairly quickly at around 6-12 months after the shock, and becomes statistically negligible after 18 months. Interestingly, the impact of uncertainty shocks on industrial production in the UK is strikingly similar to that of the US both in terms of the shape and magnitude of the response. However, unemployment in the UK is less affected by uncertainty shocks. Finally, we find that uncertainty shocks can account for about a quarter of the decline in industrial production during the Great Recession.

Evaluating Historical CGER Assessments; How Well Have They Predicted Subsequent Exchange Rate Movements?

The IMFs Consultative Group on Exchange Rate issues (CGER) has been conducting exchange rate assessments as part of the surveillance process since 1997. This paper evaluates CGER assessments from 1997 to 2006, by comparing these to subsequent movements in real effective exchange rates (REER). We find that CGERs estimated misalignments have predictive power over future REER movements, especially over longer horizons and after changes in fundamentals are accounted for. But while CGER misalignments frequently predict the direction of currency movements correctly, misalignments have tended to be persistent, resulting in systematic errors-overprediction for undervalued currencies and underprediction for overvalued currencies.

Perspectives on High Real Interest Rates in Turkey

The Turkish economy is typically characterized as having particularly high real interest rates. Fundamental considerations, such as high growth rates or high returns to capital, do not provide a satisfactory resolution of this puzzle. Instead, we find that two other factors - doubts about the sustainability of disinflation and the existence of a risk premium - have a significant impact on the level of real interest rates in Turkey. Importantly, fiscal policy variables are shown to affect both these factors, suggesting that a more credible and prudent fiscal policy can help reduce real interest rates in Turkey.

Recurring patterns in the run-up to house price busts

We present evidence that shows that large increases in credit and residential investment shares, along with deteriorating current account balances, provide useful leading indicators of house price busts. These variables also explain cross-sectional patterns in the build-up to the 2007 crisis. Interestingly, movements in output and inflation have little ability to predict house price busts.