In the wake of the 1997-98 financial crises, interest rates in Asia were raised immediately, and then reduced sharply. We describe an environment in which this is the optimal monetary policy. The optimality of the immediate rise in the interest rate is an example of the theory of the second best: although high interest rates introduce an inefficiency wedge into the labor market, they are nevertheless welfare improving because they mitigate distortions due to binding collateral constraints. Over time, as various real frictions wear off and the collateral constraint is less binding, the familiar Friedman forces dominate, and interest rates are optimally set as low as possible.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13254.
Length: Date of creation: Jul 2007 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13254
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Find related papers by JEL classification: E4 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit
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Simeon Djankov & Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silane & Andrei Shleifer & Juan Botero, 2003.
"The Regulation of Labor,"
NBER Working Papers
9756, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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