Abstract
What are the consequences of asymmetry of information about the future state of the economy between a benevolent Central Bank (CB) and private agents near the zero lower bound? How is the conduct of monetary policy modified under such a scenario? We propose a game theoretical signaling model, where the CB has better information than private agents about a future shock hitting the economy. The policy rate itself is the signal that conveys information to private agents in addition to its traditional role in the monetary transmission mechanism. We find that only multiple “pooling equilibria” arise in this environment, where a CB privately forecasting a contraction will most likely follow a less expansionary policy compared to a complete information context, in order to avoid making matters worse by revealing bad times ahead. On the other hand, a CB privately forecasting no contraction is most likely to distort its complete information policy rate, the consequences of which are welfare detrimental. However, this is necessary because deviating from the pooling policy rate would be perceived by private agents as an attempt to mislead them into believing that a contraction is not expected, which would be even more harmful for society.
A Appendix
In this appendix I study a flexible price economy, where the CB maintains i0 throughout period 0 and there is no uncertainty, with θ0 and θ1 being the productivity levels for periods 0 and 1 respectively.
Environment
As in the main model, households are indexed by j and each produce a given variety ℓ. Taking as given Pt and i0, HH j maximize:
subject to:
Choosing
where
Definition of equilibrium
A (monopolistic) competitive equilibrium is a price level Pt and an interest rate i0 such that:
Markets clear:
(54)(55)
Solution
The intra-temporal problem of how to set prices can be written for HHs as maximizing real income from the production of variety ℓ:
subject to:
where ct(ℓ) is the market demand for variety ℓ:
and
Using (58), HH’s problem can be written as:
Let λt be the multiplier for the constraint in (59). The K-K-T conditions are:
By way of contradiction it is straightforward to show that
As for the intertemporal consumption decision, the Euler equation in its aggregate form is:
A.1 Money market clearing and price level determination
Here we show that by modelling money in a simple, ad-hoc fashion, we are able to anchor the price level. First, we assume that money
We assume a given supply of money
The stock of money anchors the price level P1 = 1, by assumption. In period 0 prices are determined by Euler’s equation (61):
And given the interest rate i0, money supply in period 0 adjusts to clear the money market, using (63):
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