Publications

We build a new empirical model to estimate the global impact of an increase in the volatility of US monetary policy shocks. Specifically, we admit time-varying variances of local structural shocks from a stochastic volatility specification. By allowing for rich dynamic interaction between the endogenous variables and time-varying volatility in the global setting, we find that US interest rate uncertainty not only drives local output and inflation volatility, but also causes declines in output, inflation, and the interest rate.  Moreover, we document strong global impacts, making the world move in a very synchronous way. Crucially, spillback effects are found to be significant even for the US economy.

Keywords: US Monetary Policy, Volatility Shocks, Uncertainty, Global Economy.

JEL Codes: C32, C54, E52, E58, F44.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Bank of Lithuania.

We study the behaviour of Lithuania relative to other 25 EU countries, looking specifically at convergence in terms of GDP per capita and its growth accounting components: capital accumulation, labour and its subcomponents, i.e. participation and employment, and the Total Factor Productivity (TFP). We find that Lithuanian Real GDP per capita shows indeed a convergence path similar to the other Baltic States and they all belong to the second club (includes part of the periphery and the other new member states). The convergence paths of labour or capital accumulation do not seem significantly different compared to the ones of other EU members. The Lithuanian transition path in TFP has become plateau after the crisis but this is seemingly not a divergence factor. Two components show noticeable changes in behaviour after 2010: the growth in total factor productivity (TFP) considerably slows down, and the employment-population ratio appears to increase accounting for around one third of the annual GDP growth in Lithuania. In addition, we explore several transition scenarios for Lithuania to the EU-25 average.

JEL Codes: O47, F15, F45.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Bank of Lithuania.

This paper considers a variety of reaction functions in the context of real time data to analyse U.K. monetary policy under inflation targeting adopted in 1992. In order to deal with lack of current and future data in real time, we construct the forecasts of expected variables in the first step and use the constructed data for the estimations of contemporaneous- and forward-looking rules. Moreover, we employ the impulse-indicator saturation method to deal with the issue of outliers and therefore obtain robust estimates of policy parameters. Our results show that the robust characteristics of monetary policy during the inflation targeting regime are forward-looking and raising the interest rate by more than one-to-one to movements in inflation, thereby satisfying the Taylor principle.

JEL Codes: C22, C52, C53, E52, E58.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Bank of Lithuania.