Pawel Zabczyk

International Monetary Fund · Monetary and Capital Markets Department

Many central banks have relied on a range of policy tools, including foreign exchange intervention (FXI) and capital flow management tools (CFMs), to mitigate the effects of volatile capital flows on their economies. We develop an empirically-oriented New Keynesian model to evaluate and quantify how using multiple policy tools can potentially impro...

This paper analyzes the conduct of monetary policy in an environment in which cyclical swings in risk appetite affect households' propensity to save. It uses a New Keynesian model featuring external habit formation to show that taking note of precautionary saving motives justifies an accommodative policy bias in the face of persistent, adverse dist...

This paper uses a time-varying Factor Augmented VAR to investigate the evolving transmission of monetary policy and demand shocks in the UK. Simultaneous estimation of time-varying impulse responses of a large set of macroeconomic variables and disaggregated prices suggest that the response of inflation, money supply and asset prices to monetary po...

We refer to the idea that government must ‘tighten its belt’ as a necessary policy response to higher indebtedness as the household fallacy. We provide a reason to be skeptical of this claim that holds even if the economy always operates at full employment and all markets clear. Our argument rests on the fact that, in an overlapping-generations (OL...

We present a New Keynesian model with endogenous risk. The conditional output gap volatility depends on the price of risk, giving rise to a vulnerability channel of monetary policy. Lower interest rates not only shift consumption intertemporally but also shift conditional output risk. The model fits estimates of the conditional output gap distribut...

We extend the New Keynesian (NK) model to include endogenous risk. Lower interest rates not only shift consumption intertemporally but also conditional output risk via their impact on risk-taking, giving rise to a vulnerability channel of monetary policy. The model fits the conditional output gap distribution and can account for medium-term increas...

This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing, a form of unconventional monetary policy that changes the risk composition of the central bank balance sheet. We construct a general equilibrium model where agents have rational expectations, and there is a complete set of financial securities, but where some agents are unable to particip...

The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL) is the claim that, in a popular class of theoretical models, the price level is sometimes determined by fiscal policy rather than monetary policy. The models where this claim has been established assume that all decisions are made by an infinitely-lived representative agent. We present an alternative, arg...

This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing, a form of unconventional monetary policy that changes the risk composition of the central bank balance sheet with the goal of stabilizing economic activity. We construct a general equilibrium model where agents have rational expectations and there is a complete set of financial securities...

This paper develops an efficient method to compute higher-order perturbation approximations of bond prices. At third order, our approach can significantly shorten the approximation process and its precision exceeds the log-normal method and a procedure using consol bonds. The efficiency gains greatly facilitate any estimation which is illustrated b...

This paper studies the policy implications of habits and cyclical changes in agents' appetite for risk-taking. To do so, it analyses the non-linear solution of a New Keynesian (NK) model, in which slow-moving habits help match the cyclical properties of risk-premia. Our findings suggest that the presence of habits and swings in risk appetite can ma...

This paper considers the implications for the United States, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world (ROW) of shocks that may contribute to a further reduction in global current account imbalances using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We consider a shock that increases domestic demand in the ROW; a shock that reduces dom...

This paper develops a fast method of computing arbitrary order perturbation approximations to bond prices in DSGE models. The procedure is implemented to third order where it can shorten the approximation process by more than 100 times. In a consumption-based endowment model with habits, it is further shown that a third-order perturbation solution...

This paper develops a DSGE model in which banks use short term deposits to provide firms with long-term credit. The demand for long-term credit arises because firms must borrow in order to finance their capital stock which they only adjust at infrequent intervals. We show that the presence of maturity transformation in the banking section has real...

This paper develops a fast method of computing arbitrary order perturbation approximations to bond prices in DSGE models. The procedure is implemented to third order where it can shorten the approximation process by more than one hundred times. In a consumption-based endowment model with habits, it is further shown that a third order perturbation s...

This paper uses a factor-augmented vector autoregression technique to examine the role that macroeconomic and sector-specific factors play in UK price fluctuations at the aggregate and disaggregated levels. Macroeconomic factors are less important for disaggregated prices than aggregate ones. There also appears to be significant aggregation bias -...

Empirical evidence suggests that risk premia are higher at business cycle troughs than they are at peaks. Existing asset pricing theories ascribe moves in risk premia to changes in volatility or risk aversion. Nevertheless, in a simple general equilibrium model, risk premia can be procyclical even though the volatility of consumption is constant an...

This thesis is a collection of four essays dealing with issues on the verge of macroeconomics and finance. The first two chapters are joint with Bianca De Paoli. In the first one, we try to analyze factors causing risk premia to vary over time. The second one is an attempt to understand how these factors - manifesting themselves through swings in t...

This paper calculates indices of central bank autonomy (CBA) for 163 central banks as of end-2003, and comparable indices for a subgroup of 68 central banks as of the end of the 1980s. The results confirm strong improvements in both economic and political CBA over the past couple of decades, although more progress is needed to boost political auton...