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What Can Time-Series Regressions Tell Us About Policy Counterfactuals?

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Abstract

We show that, in a general family of linearized structural macroeconomic models, knowledge of the empirically estimable causal effects of contemporaneous and news shocks to the prevailing policy rule is sufficient to construct counterfactuals under alternative policy rules. If the researcher is willing to postulate a loss function, our results furthermore allow her to recover an optimal policy rule for that loss. Under our assumptions, the derived counterfactuals and optimal policies are robust to the Lucas critique. We then discuss strategies for applying these insights when only a limited amount of empirical causal evidence on policy shock transmission is available.

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  • Alisdair McKay & Christian K. Wolf, 2023. "What Can Time-Series Regressions Tell Us About Policy Counterfactuals?," Staff Report 642, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmsr:95599
    DOI: 10.21034/sr.642
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    Cited by:

    1. Istrefi, Klodiana & Hack, Lukas & Meier, Matthias, 2023. "Identification of Systematic Monetary Policy," CEPR Discussion Papers 17999, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Régis Barnichon & Geert Mesters, 2023. "Evaluating Policy Institutions -150 Years of US Monetary Policy-," Working Papers 1410, Barcelona School of Economics.
    3. Georgiadis, Georgios & Müller, Gernot J. & Schumann, Ben, 2021. "Global risk and the dollar," Working Paper Series 2628, European Central Bank.
    4. Madeira, Carlos & Salazar, Leonardo, 2023. "The impact of monetary policy on a labor market with heterogeneous workers: The case of Chile," Latin American Journal of Central Banking (previously Monetaria), Elsevier, vol. 4(2).
    5. Wataru Miyamoto & Thuy Lan Nguyen & Dmitry Sergeyev, 2023. "How Oil Shocks Propagate: Evidence on the Monetary Policy Channel," Working Paper Series 2024-06, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    6. Régis Barnichon & Geert Mesters, 2020. "A Sufficient Statistics Approach for Macro Policy Evaluation," Working Papers 1171, Barcelona School of Economics.
    7. Régis Barnichon & Geert Mesters, 2023. "Evaluating policy institutions -150 years of US monetary policy-," Economics Working Papers 1873, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    8. Christian K. Wolf, 2023. "Fiscal Stimulus and the Systematic Response of Monetary Policy," AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association, vol. 113, pages 388-393, May.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Monetary policy; Macroeconomic modeling; Policy shocks; Business cycles; Lucas critique; Policy counterfactuals;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • E61 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination

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