Analysing Monetary Policy Shocks by Sign and Parametric Restrictions: The Evidence from Russia

Abstract

Most, if not all, of the studies in the existing literature that have examined the impacts of monetary policy implications on macroeconomic aggregates suffered from misleading impulse responses. To overcome the limitations in the existing literature and to fill the gap in the literature, this study applies the new Keynesian model by imposing the sign and parametric restrictions to investigate the effects of policy shocks on the economic aggregates for Russia by implementing SVARs, yielding a better understanding of the impacts of monetary policy shocks on the Russian economy and proving superior to other existing methods. Our approach avoids impulse response anomalies such as the price puzzle and eludes implausible overshooting responses to the subjected innovations by using prior information. Our findings indicate that although monetary policy shocks create a significant decrease in inflation in the short run within both median target responses and median responses, they have a tolerable negative effect on the output gap. On the other hand, demand shocks do not generate a significant rise in output but create inflation, while cost-push shocks generate significantly detrimental results in both inflation and output. The results draw a further step towards validating the new Keynesian theory in the Russian case by revealing the short-run nonneutrality of monetary policy intervention. Our findings also showed that the cost-push shocks have significant damaging effects on both inflation and output and that interest rates strongly respond to both cost-push and demand shocks. Our findings successfully solve the price puzzle problem, justify the new Keynesian theory that holds that monetary policy shocks only have a short-run effect, and imply that Volcker-Greenspan's rule could be a useful guide for policy makers to solve the problem efficiently. In addition, our findings can be used to make important policy recommendations for policy makers as discussed in the conclusion section.