A New Approach to Measuring Economic Policy Shocks, with an Application to Conventional and Unconventional Monetary Policy

No 1082, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We propose a new approach to analyze economic shocks. Our new procedure identifies economic shocks as exogenous shifts in a function; hence, we call the "functional shocks". We show how to identify such shocks and how to trace their effects in the economy via VARs using a procedure that we call "VARs with functional shocks". Using our new procedure, we address the crucial question of studying the effects or monetary policy by identifying monetary policy shocks as shifts in the whole term structure of government bond yields in a narrow window of time around monetary policy announcements. Our identification sheds new light on the effects of monetary policy shocks, both in conventional and unconventional periods, and shows that traditional identification procedures may miss important effects. We find that, overall, unconventional monetary policy has similar effects to conventional expansionary monetary policy, leading to an increase in both output growth and inflation; the response is hump-shaped; peaking around one year to one year and a half after the shock. The new procedure has the advantage of identifying monetary policy shocks during both conventional and unconventional monetary policy periods in a unified manner and can be applied more generally to other economic shocks.

Keywords: shock identification; VARs; zero-lower bound; unconventional monetary policy; forward guidance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 E21 E4 E52 H31 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Journal Article: A new approach to measuring economic policy shocks, with an application to conventional and unconventional monetary policy (2021)
Working Paper: A new approach to measuring economic policy shocks, with an application to conventional and unconventional monetary policy (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1082

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