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The role of money and monetary policy of the central bank in pursuing macroeconomic stability has significantly changed over the period since the end of World War II. Globalization, liberalization, integration, and transition processes generally shaped the crucial milestones of the macroeconomic development and substantial features of economic policy and its framework in Europe. Policy-driven changes together with variety of exogenous shocks significantly affected the key features of macroeconomic environment on the European continent that fashioned the framework and design of monetary policies.

This chapter examines the key basis of the central bank’s monetary policy on its way to pursue and preserve the internal and external stability of the purchasing power of money. Substantial elements of the monetary policy like objectives and strategies are not only generally introduced but also critically discussed according to their accuracy, suitability, and reliability in the changing macroeconomic conditions. Brief overview of the Eurozone common monetary policy milestones and the past Eastern bloc countries’ experience with a variety of exchange rate regimes provides interesting empirical evidence on origins and implications of vital changes in the monetary policy conduction in Europe and the Eurozone.

Sufficiently persistent rise in nominal interest increases inflation rate in short-run. This short-run comovement of nominal interest rate and inflation rate is known as Neo-Fisherianism. This chapter proposes a policy based on Neo-Fisherianism to escape Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) using a textbook Forward Looking New Keynesian Model. I have shown that proposed policy with properly chosen inflation target and persistence can stimulate economy and escape ZLB by raising nominal interest rate. I have also shown that the proposed policy is robust to varying degrees of price stickiness.

Vector‐autoregression (VAR), integration, and cointegration models are used to investigate the causal relations, dynamic interaction, and a common trend between interest rates and inflation in nine countries in the Pacific‐Basin. This paper finds that for all countries, short‐ and long‐term interest rates and the spread between the long‐term interest rates and inflation are non‐stationary I (1) processes. The nominal interest rates and inflation are not co‐integrated. In addition to this study’s inability to find a unidirectional causality between inflation and interest rates, when the VAR model is used, it also fails to find a consistent positive response either of inflation to shocks in interest rates or of interest rates to shocks in inflation in most of the countries studied. The VAR model results are consistent with the cointegration tests’ results, that is, nominal interest rates are poor predictors for future inflation in the Pacific‐Basin countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ability of monetary policy to generate real effects in laboratory general equilibrium production economies.

To understand why monetary policy is not consistently effective at stabilizing economic activity, the author vary the types of agents interacting in the economy and consider treatments where subjects are playing the role of households (firms) in an economy where automated firms (households) are programmed to behave rationally.

While the majority of participants’ expectations respond to monetary policy in the direction intended, subjects do form expectations adaptively, relying heavily on past variables and forecasts in forming two-steps-ahead forecasts. Moreover, in the presence of counterparts that are boundedly rational, forecast accuracy worsens significantly. When interacting with automated households, updating firms’ prices respond modestly to monetary policy and significantly to anticipated marginal costs and future prices. The greatest deviations in behavior from theoretical predictions arise from human households (HH). Households persistent oversupply of labor and under-consumption is attributed to precautionary saving and debt aversion. The results provide evidence that the effects of monetary policy on decision making hinge on the distribution of indebtedness of households.

The author present causal evidence of the effects of potential bounded rationality on agents’ consumption and labor decisions.

This study investigates the impact of federal income tax rates and budget deficits on the nominal interest rate yield on high-grade municipal tax-free bonds (municipals) in the US. The 58-year study period covers the years 1959 through 2016 and thus is very recent.

The study develops a loanable funds model that allows for various financial market factors. Once developed, the model is estimated by autoregressive two-stage least squares, with a Newey-West heteroskedasticity correction.

The nominal interest rate yield on municipals is a decreasing function of the maximum marginal federal personal income tax rate and an increasing function of the federal budget deficit (expressed as a per cent of GDP). This yield is also an increasing function of nominal interest rate yields on three- and ten-year treasury notes and expected inflation.

When introducing additional interest rates such as treasury bills as explanatory variables, multi-collinearity becomes a serious problem.

This study indicates that lower maximum federal personal income tax rates and larger federal budget deficits, both act to raise borrowing costs for cities (of all sizes), counties and states across the country. Given the study period of 58 years, these relationships appear to be enduring ones that responsible policy-makers should not overlook.

Tax reform and debt management need to be conducted in a very circumspect fashion.

No recent study investigating the impact of the two key policy variables in this study has been published.

What causes the downward trend of real interest rates in major developed economies since the 1980s? What are the challenges of the near-zero interest and inflation rates for monetary policy? What can the policymakers learn from the latest developments in the monetary and interest rate theory? This paper aims to answer these questions by reviewing both basic principles of interest rate determination and recent academic and policy debates.

The paper critically reviews the explanations for the downward trend of real interest rates in recent decades and monetary policy options in a near-zero interest rate environment.

The decline of real interest rates is likely an outcome of multiple technological, social and economic factors including diminished productivity growth, changing demographics, elevated tail-risk concerns, time-varying convenience yields of safe assets, increased global demand for safe assets, rising wealth and income inequality, falling relative price of capital, accommodative monetary policies, and changes in industry structure that alter the investment and saving behaviors of the corporate sector. The near-zero interest rate limits the space of central banks' response to economic crises. It also challenges some conventional wisdoms of monetary theory and sparks radically new ideas about monetary policy.

This survey differs from the existing work by taking a broader view of both economics and finance literature. It critically assesses the economic forces driving the global decline of real interest rates through the lens of basic principles and empirical evidence and discusses the merits and limitations of each proposed explanation. The study emphasizes the importance of a better understanding of economic forces driving diverging trends of corporate investment and saving behaviors. It also discusses the implications of the neo-Fisherism and the fiscal theory of price level for monetary policy in a low interest rate environment.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of the real interest rates, inflation and risk premium on the time deposit rates of banks in the dual banking system in Malaysia.

The data consists of 1-, 6- and 12-month average time deposit rates of conventional and Islamic banks over the period of January 2000 to June 2017. The cointegration methodologies are used to explore links between the time deposit rates, real rates, inflation and risk premium. The causality tests to test causality linkages between pairs of variables are also applied. The generalised forecast error variance decomposition based on the error correction model is conducted to analyse the impact of variables variation on the deposit rates.

The results show the presence of two cointegration vectors in the deposit rates, real rates, inflation and risk premium, for both conventional and Islamic bank rates. Causality tests reveal that deposit rates are caused by inflation and risk premium in a one-way causality. The results of variance decomposition highlight the importance of inflation and risk premium in explaining the variations in the bank deposit rates. For the conventional bank, inflation shocks play the most important role in explaining the movements of the deposit rates. In Islamic banks, the major determinant’s largest influence is the risk premium. Between the two bank rates, Islamic bank rates receive more influence from the explanatory variables in the long-run compared to conventional bank rates. The real rates have no noticeable effect on the variance of time deposit rates for both banks.

This study presents new evidence on the relationship between time deposit rates and the three explanatory variables, which are the real interest rates, inflation and risk premium, for both conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia. The dual banking system allows exploring the similarities and differences between conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia in terms of the linkages between the variables.

This paper derives the optimal monetary policy under discretion, taking into account that aggregate spending depends on the long‐term real interest rate rather than on the short‐term rate. It deduces optimal shock‐dependent strategies for the monetary instrument, the nominal interest rate and analyzes the influence of both the degree of persistence of supply and demand shocks and the weight on output stabilization in the objective function of the central bank on the optimal monetary reaction. The higher the degree of persistence of a supply shock, the stronger is the reaction of the interest rate, whereas the opposite holds for a demand shock. The reaction on demand disturbances is independent of weight given to output stabilization by the central bank; in the case of a supply shock the reaction of the interest rate depends on this weight.

Investigates primarily the role of interest rates on housing prices from expectation perspectives. It quantifies the impact of interest rates on price movements from 1981 to 2001 in Hong Kong. The principal finding is that housing prices display a moderately high correlation with interest rates in the deflationary 1998‐2001 period. Reduced interest rates are linked to higher housing prices until 1997, thereafter, such inverse relationship appears to be non‐existent. The impact of interest rates tends to be significantly positive in the inflationary pre‐1997 period. But most of the fall in housing prices since early 1998 can be attributed to low hope‐led price expectations. The results indicate that interest rates do not “Granger‐cause” housing prices, and that the positive interest rate effect in deflationary periods seems to have been negated by anticipated capital losses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which conventional and Islamic bank fixed deposit rates can protect depositors against inflation in the Malaysia context.

Nominal interest rates are represented by commercial bank fixed deposit and investment bank fixed deposit rates. The authors use monthly data over the period 2000–2016. The authors apply the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing methodology to test the existence of long-run relationship between nominal rates and inflation, and the error-correction model to test for the short-run dynamics.

The results show that the nominal interest rate and inflation are cointegrated for all the data series. The evidence indicates that all the fixed deposit rates, for both conventional and Islamic banks are effective inflation hedges in the long-run thereby supporting the Fisher hypothesis. There is no difference in the inflation hedging ability between conventional bank rates and Islamic bank rates. However, the authors find no evidence of the short-run relationship between interest rates and inflation for either bank.

Bank regulators should be concerned on the similarities in behaviour towards inflation between conventional and Islamic rates, given that the deposit rates for both banks are supposedly set based on different premises. Bank customers, they should deposit their money for the long horizon in order to protect themselves against inflation. Depositors worrying about inflation should be indifferent between conventional or Islamic as both banks provide similar inflation hedging characteristics.

The novelty of this study is in using the bank fixed deposit rates to study the Fisher effect in an emerging market and in comparing the conventional and Islamic bank rates in terms of their inflation hedging ability.