On the Evolution of Monetary Policy

This paper investigates the evolution of monetary policy in the U.S. using a standard set of macroeconomic variables. Many recent papers have addressed the issue of whether the monetary transmission mechanism has changed (e.g. due to the Fed taking a more aggressive stance against inflation) or whether apparent changes are simply due to changes in the volatility of exogenous shocks. A subsidiary question is whether any such changes have been gradual or abrupt. In this paper, we shed light on these issues using a mixture innovation model which extends the class of time varying Vector Autoregressive models with stochastic volatility which have been used in the past. The advantage of our extension is that it allows us to estimate whether, where, when and how parameter change is occurring (as opposed to assuming a particular form of parameter change). Our empirical results strongly indicate that the transmission mechanism, the volatility of exogenous shocks and the correlations between exogenous shocks are all changing (albeit at different times and to different extents) Furthermore, evolution of parameters is gradual.