Cross-Country Evidence on Monetary Policy Autonomy: A Markov Regime Switching Approach

This paper revisits the definition of monetary policy autonomy and develops a new method to identify autonomy regimes of a set of countries. Compared to the traditional identification approach, which only focuses on the base country interest rate, monetary policy autonomy discussed in this paper is jointly determined by how the interest rate responds to foreign monetary policy as well as its domestic inflation and real GDP. Using a Bayesian Markov Switching model for the monetary policy function, I estimate policy responses in two regimes, and obtain measures of monetary policy autonomy in the estimation process. Testing the method with case studies and simulated data demonstrates the robustness of the approach under different scenarios. Applying the method to the data of a set of advanced countries, I find monetary policy autonomy decreases when exchange rate is fixed or capital control is loosened, which is consistent with the open economy trilemma.