Three essays on monetary policy modeling : applications of inflation targeting

This dissertation is made up of three essays on modeling monetary policy in a New Keynesian framework. The first essay presents an overview of the evolution of New Keynesian view. Since most of the studies in monetary policy literature employ New Keynesian models due to their power in accounting for price rigidities, microeconomic foundations and various monetary policy rules; such a survey improves our understanding of the type of theoretical and empirical research that has so far been conducted to analyze monetary policy within a New Keynesian framework. This first essay also gives a detailed derivation of structural relationships developed from microfoundations. The second essay examines the behavior of Taylor-type monetary policy rule by introducing interest rate pass-through in a New Keynesian setting with backward looking components. A simulation is performed to analyze the behavior of policy instrument and pass-through relationship under inflation targeting. The main contribution of this essay is the introduction of interest rate pass-through into a New Keynesian structural model for the first time. Besides, as differently from the previous literature, the structural model allows for time-varying parameters (TVP) not only for the parameters of the monetary policy rule but also for the coefficients of the interest rate passthrough and other dynamics of the system. This is a salient feature of the analysis here, since previous studies in this field typically allow for variation over time of parameters of the monetary policy rule alone. However, having TVP specification for all parameters of the model provides the flexibility of examining the impact of policy changes over the monetary policy rule, interest rate pass-through and other dynamics of the system. The last important aspect of the second essay is the use of Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) as the estimation technique. That EKF is not widely employed for estimating nonlinear systems in this field makes this study significant in demonstrating the strength of EKF in predicting TVP models. The results of the simulations carried out within this essay revealed that long-term interest rate and interest rate pass-through specification are essential ingredients to be included in monetary policy analysis. The last essay investigates whether inflation targeting programs have altered the pattern of inflation and its variability for five developed countries and four emerging economies implementing inflation targeting programs. A generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) specification is used to model inflation variability, which accounts for public perception of the future levels of inflation variability − conditional variance. We found that implementation of inflation targeting program has changed the public perception towards inflation only in Australia, Chile, Sweden and the UK, indicating limited empirical support for the lower inflation and its variability for the inflation targeting regimes.