중앙은행의 목적 설정과 거시경제 성과

초록

This paper analyzes the effect of central bank mandates on macroeconomic performance, and tries to find implications on optimal settings of central bank mandates through theoretical models and empirical analyses. Historically, primary mandate or objective of central banks has been changing depending on economic situations: from the lender of last resort (financial stability) to price stability, and again to financial stability. In particular, financial stability has been stressed more after the global financial crisis of 2008. I set up theoretical models where the parameters regarding central bank objectives or preferences affect macroeconomic outcomes through expectations channels. Textbook models without any considerations of financial stability shows that single ‘price stability’ mandate is effective in achieving inflation target. But, if the assumptions regarding economic structure change so that financial instability can have adverse effects on unemployment with positive probabilities, dual objectives-price stability and financial stability-can be more appropriate in stabilizing macroeconomic variables. As for empirics, I classified central bank laws of 23 countries into different categories following the types and numbers of the mandates, and then analyzed the relationship between mandate types/numbers and macroeconomic performance. Mandate type has been defined according to the distance from the single ‘price stability’ (type 1) mandate, so that type 7 refers to the central banks with most diverse mandates. The number of objectives has been counted following the criteria that primary objectives are considered to be 1, while sub-objectives or conditional objectives are regarded as 0.5. The results show that ‘price stability and financial stability with sub-objectives of supporting general economic policies’ or ‘2.5 mandates’ exhibited better economic performance than others. This is consistent with the predictions of theoretical models of this paper. Moreover, I conducted panel analyses to see if this difference has something to do with policy rates’ responses to changes in macroeconomic variables, and found out that the coefficients do not significantly differ across central bank types. This implies that central bank mandates might have affected macroeconomic performance not through policy rate changes but through expectations channels such as pronouncement effects. Judging from the analyses in this paper, financial stability should be emphasized more in the Bank of Korea Act.

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