Download or read book Three Essays on Fiscal Policy and Redistribution written by Enlinson Carvalho de Mattos and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second essay integrates the existence of poverty as a negative externality and tax on poor individuals and that the possibility of tax evasion plays a role to determine the size and the sign of the optimal marginal income tax.

Download or read book Essays on Redistributive Fiscal Policies and Macroeconomics written by Mariano Eduardo Spector and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 study redistributive fiscal policies. Chapter 3 analyzes the role of asymmetric information in frictional labor markets. Fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession consisted mainly of transfers, rather than government purchases. Chapter 1 analyzes the role of marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) in shaping the effect of such policies. I construct a continuous-time New Keynesian model with heterogeneous overlapping generations which allows for arbitrary MPC heterogeneity. I characterize the output multipliers of fiscal transfers, and show that the role of MPCs is mainly to determine the timing of the fiscal stimulus. The relation between this timing and the cumulative effect on output is, however, ambiguous. Indeed, I show that transfers to low-MPC consumers may generate a higher cumulative effect on output. From a normative perspective, however, there is no ambiguity: with larger differences in MPCs, optimal policy can obtain macro stabilization with smaller welfare losses. In Chapter 2, I analyze redistributive policies when households are heterogeneous with respect to both their MPCs and their risk aversion. I characterize transfer multipliers in a model in which capital is subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risk. Based on survey data, I assume that MPCs and risk aversion are positively correlated in the population. A redistribution from low-MPC, low-risk aversion households to high-MPC, high-risk aversion households creates two opposing effects: a higher mean MPC tends to stimulate aggregate demand, but an increase in the mean risk aversion tends to depress asset prices, generating a negative income effect on consumption. In Chapter 3, I study a frictional labor market with horizontally differentiated workers. Firms have incomplete information about the skills of workers who apply to their vacancies. Workers self-insure against unemployment risk by applying to jobs for which their skills are not well suited. This decreases firms’ incentives to create vacancies by deteriorating the quality of the average applicant. Workers thus impose a negative externality on each other, which makes the equilibrium inefficient. However, although workers apply to too many jobs, I show that unemployment can be too low or too high. Welfare-improving government policies are considered.

Download or read book Three Essays in Fiscal Policy written by Axelle Ferriere and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Government Policy Labor Supply and Income Distribution written by Ximing Wu and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Fiscal Policy written by Sinem Buber Singh and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Income Redistribution written by Bo Hyun Chang and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Income redistribution is one of the primary concerns for policy makers and economists. Among the countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the degree of income redistribution (measured by the percentage decrease in the income Gini coefficients between the before and after taxes/transfers) ranges from 5% (Chile) to 49% (Ireland). Understanding and comparing redistribution policies across countries in a unified framework is not an easy task. However, recent developments in quantitative general equilibrium heterogeneous-agents models allow us to address several issues. In this dissertation I study three issues about the redistribution polices using a state-of-the-art quantitative general equilibrium model. Chapter 1 uncovers Pareto weights that justify the current progressivity of income taxes in 32 OECD countries. Chapter 2 shows that the current tax rate in the U.S. can be close to political equilibrium under an ex-ante differences in earnings ability and income-dependent voting behaviors. Chapter 3 finds and explains the negative relationship between economic outlook and income redistribution. In Chapter 1, we develop a model that reproduces income distribution and redistribution policies in 32 OECD countries. The individual income tax schedule is assumed to follow a log-linear tax function, which is widely used in the literature (Heathcote et al., 2016). According to our model, the optimal tax progressivity under the equal-weight utilitarian social welfare function varies from 0.21 (South Korea) to 0.41 (Ireland), and the corresponding optimal redistribution ranges between 20% (South Korea) and 37% (Ireland). For 22 countries, mostly European countries, the current progressivity is higher than optimal. In the other 10 countries, including the U.S., the optimal progressivity is higher than the current one. In our model the optimal tax progressivity is favored by the majority of the population in almost all OECD countries. Then, why does the current (suboptimal) tax rate prevail? The society's choice for redistribution may differ from the equal-weight utilitarian welfare function (Weinzierl, 2014; Heathcote and Tsujiyama, 2016), or can be affected by various factors such as the externality of public expenditure (Heathcote et al., 2016), and the preference heterogeneity (Lockwood and Weinzierl, 2015). In this chapter we ask a rather simple positive question within the utilitarian framework: what are the weights in the social welfare function that justify the current tax progressivity as optimal? We interpret these relative weights in the social welfare function as broadly representing each society's preferences for redistribution and political arrangement. According to our calculations, in Sweden, the average Pareto weight on the richest 20% of the population is only 0.53, whereas that on the poorest 20% is 1.74. By contrast, in Chile, the Pareto weight on the richest 20% is 2.65, whereas that on the poorest 20% is a mere 0.15. In the U.S. that on the richest 20% is 1.45 and that on the poorest 20% is 0.60. We also compare our social weights to those from Lockwood and Weinzierl (2016), who extend Mirrleesian (1971) framework to uncover weights. To our knowledge, this is the first study that compares how societies aggregate individual preferences over redistributive policies, and does so across a large set of countries. The utilitarian social welfare function often predicts that the optimal income tax rate in the U.S. is much higher than the current rate (e.g., Piketty and Saez, 2013). In Chapter 2, we focus on the interaction of ex-ante heterogeneity in household earnings and income-dependent turnout rates. While the relationship between each factor and income redistribution has been reported by many studies (Benabou and Ok, 2001; Charite et al., 2015, Mahler, 2008), quantitatively neither effect alone is large enough to explain the current tax rate. However, the interaction of the two magnifies the effect on redistribution, political equilibrium can be close to the current tax rate. More specifically, we construct three model economies: no ex-ante heterogeneity (NH), small ex-ante heterogeneity (SH), and large ex-ante heterogeneity (LH). All three economies match the overall income dispersion (Gini coefficient) in the data, but the share of ex-ante productivity (ability) and ex-post productivity (shocks) is different. According to our estimates following Guvenen (2009), 31% (SH) and 57% (LH) of wage dispersions are driven by ex-ante productivity. In the NH, by design, all wage dispersions are from ex-post productivity. For tractability, a flat tax rate and a lump-sum transfer are assumed in this chapter. The current tax rates in the three economies are set to 24% from the U.S. data. According to our model, the optimal tax rates under an equal-weight utilitarian social welfare criterion are similar in all three economies: 37% (NH), 38% (SH) and 37%. These high optimal tax rates are consistent with a majority of literature based on a utilitarian social welfare function (e.g., Piketty and Saez, 2013; Heathcote and Tsujiyama, 2016). The tax rates chosen by a simple majority rule are 37% (NH), 37%(SH), and 34% (LH), still much higher than the current rate. However, once we introduce increasing voter turnout rates with income, as in the data (Mahler, 2008), the political equilibrium vastly differs across the three economies. The tax rates chosen by effective voting are 35% (NH), 33% (SH), and 27% (LH). In LH, where income dispersion is driven mainly by ex-ante productivity, the insurance benefit from a heavy tax-and-transfer policy diminishes, and high-ability households are more against strong redistribution. If their turnout rates are higher, a relatively low tax rate can become a political equilibrium, which is close to the current tax rate. In Chapter 3, I find a new relationship between the economic outlook and redistribution among 33 OECD countries between 1996 and 2010, using the historical forecasts in the World Economic Outlook and the Standardized World Income Inequality Database. A one percentage point decrease in expected growth is associated with a 0.005 point and 0.9% increase in the income Gini before taxes and transfers. To examine this relationship I introduce labor-augmenting technology into my model at the cost of assuming a simple tax structure (linear tax and lump-sum transfer). The current tax rate (21.8%) and labor-augmenting productivity growth (3%) are chosen to match the U.S. economy before the Great Recession. Then, after an unanticipated productivity slowdown, the productivity growth decreases to 1%. Once productivity slows down, households save more to prepare for lost consumption in the future. As the capital-to-output ratio increases, the interest rate goes down from 4% to 1.7%. As seen in previous chapters, explaining the current tax rate is still disputed. Leaving this question to other studies, this chapter focuses on the effect of a productivity slowdown. More specifically, social weights that justify the current tax rates are derived, and, given these weights, the optimal tax rate under the low-growth regime is calculated. While all households save more against productivity slowdown, poor households, who are close to borrowing constraints, have more difficulty in increasing their savings. Hence, higher tax rates (23.6%) and more transfers can enhance social welfare under the low-growth regime. This relationship between expected growth and redistribution is similar to my empirical estimates. A general equilibrium effect from increased capital plays an important role. If interest rates are fixed, private savings are more effective against a productivity slowdown, since households can continue to save at the same rate. In this economy the optimal tax rate under the low-growth regime is much lower than the current rate."--Pages v-viii.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Political Economy of Redistribution written by Giorgio Bellettini and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on International Macroeconomics and Fiscal Policy written by Loukas Karabarbounis and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In all cases, men commit to a career in the market and take less home duties than women. As a result, their market work becomes less substitutable to home duty. When society resolves its distributional concerns efficiently with gender-specific lump sum transfers, GBT with higher marginal tax rates on men is optimal. The third essay examines the relationship between inequality and redistribution in a panel of OECD countries. Using panel data methods that hold constant a variety of determinants of redistributive spending, I find a non-monotonic relationship between pre-tax-and-transfer distribution of income and redistribution. Relative to mean income, a more affluent rich and middle class are associated with less redistribution and a richer poor class is associated with more redistribution. These results are consistent with a one dollar, one vote politico-economic equilibrium: When the income of a group of citizens increases, aggregate redistributive policies tilt towards this group's most preferred policies.

Download or read book Essays on the Effects of Fiscal Policy on Intergenerational Transfers and Redistribution written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Taxation and Fiscal Policy written by Nana Quaicoe and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines issues on taxation, fiscal policy, and governance in developing countries. The three chapters of the dissertation are summarized as follows: In the first chapter, we argue that models of advanced countries are often applied to developing countries with little consideration for differences in economic structures. Deviating from this norm, we examine fiscal policy effects in a simple DSGE model structured after a developing economy with credit constraints. Building a model akin to that of a developing economy largely dominated by an agriculture sector, we allow for agents that are credit constrained and noncredit-constrained. First, we observe and provide new evidence that allowing for household heterogeneity significantly alters how fiscal policy affects consumption, output, and labor in developing countries when compared to standard representative agent models. Second, we find that shocks are more subdued in the two agent model than the representative agent model when simulated with data for developing countries. For the second chapter, we contribute to the literature on tax models and the field of public economics by examining the fiscal policy effects of a small developing country if it adopts a comprehensive progressive tax structure.We analyze this under the context where a large proportion of households are credit constrained. We discover that under a progressive tax structure, the government finances its purchases by increasing taxes for those with access to financial markets while reducing taxes of households that are credit-constrained suggesting evidence of income redistribution. Finally, we find that macroeconomic analyses are considerably different when the tax structure is progressive compared to flat thereby having several policy implications for developing countries. Lastly, in the third chapter, we use annual aggregate data for 58 developing countries covering the period 2000-2015 to investigate whether alternative elements of governance have differing effects on the relationship between total public debt and private investment. First, results suggest that total public debt is considerably lower in countries with good governance while private investment thrives in countries with favorable political regimes. Second, there is evidence of crowding out(total public debt displaces private investment) with the extent of crowding out largely related to governance. Government effectiveness and corruption are the governance in-dicators that appear to have the greatest impact on investment. Corruption is found to be the most important aspect of governance in terms of the relationship between total public debt and private investment: an increase in total public debt has the greatest effect on reducing private investment in countries with low levels of corruption.

Download or read book Essays on Monetary and Fiscal Policy written by Choongryul Yang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation investigates the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy using both empirical and theoretical frameworks. Chapter 1 examines how the number of products sold by a firm affect its decisions regarding price setting and information acquisition. Using a firm-level survey from New Zealand, I show that firms that produce more goods have both better information about aggregate inflation and more frequent but smaller price changes. To characterize the implications of these empirical findings for the ability of monetary policy to stimulate the economy, I develop a new dynamic general equilibrium model with rationally inattentive multi-product firms that pay a menu cost to reset their prices. I show that the interaction of the menu cost and rational inattention frictions leads firms to adopt a wait-and-see policy and gives rise to a new selection effect: firms have time-varying inaction bands widened by their subjective uncertainty about the economy such that price adjusters choose to be better informed than non-adjusters. This selection effect endogenously generates a distribution of desired price changes with a majority near zero and some very far from zero, which acts as a strong force to amplify monetary non-neutrality. I calibrate the model to be consistent with the micro-evidence on both prices and inattention and find two main quantitative results. First, the new selection effect, coupled with imperfect information of price setters, leads to real effects of monetary policy shocks in the one-good version of the model that are nearly as large as those in the Calvo model. Second, in the two-good version of the model, as firms optimally choose to have better information about monetary shocks, the real effects of monetary policy shocks decline by 20%. In Chapter 2, joint with Hassan Afrouzi, we develop a general equilibrium flexible price model with dynamic rational inattention in which the slope of the Phillips curve is endogenous to systematic aspects of monetary policy. This Phillips curve is flatter when the monetary policy is more hawkish: rationally inattentive firms find it optimal to ignore monetary policy shocks when the monetary authority commits to stabilize nominal variables. Moreover, an unexpectedly more dovish monetary policy leads to a completely flat Phillips curve in the short-run and a steeper Phillips curve in the long-run. We also develop a tractable method for solving general dynamic rational inattention models in linear quadratic Gaussian setups. Chapter 3 asks whether the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus policy depends on the degree of economic income inequality. Many previous works about state-dependence of fiscal multiplier have focused on the degree of slack in the economy. In a surge of concerns about rising inequality of the U.S., I use rich historical state-level data on military procurement and inequality to find the relationship between the degree of income inequality and the local government spending multipliers. I show that the effects of government spending shocks on output are larger in low-inequality states than in high-inequality states. In contrast, I find no evidence that employment multipliers differ by the extent of income inequality. These results are robust to various specifications and other sources of inequality data. I also estimate aggregate output multipliers using historical military spending and income inequality data. I find the evidence that aggregate output multipliers are high when the income inequality is low. Thus, both local and aggregate multipliers are significantly affected by the degree of income inequality of an economy. I consider a variety of potential theoretical explanations for the results, including heterogeneous within-sector inequality and distributional effects of government spending shock, but find that none can adequately explain this finding

Download or read book Essays on Fiscal Policy and International Economics written by Tannous Kass-Hanna and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis tackles the transmission of fiscal policy, with a focus on noisy news and its cross-border spillovers. It is composed of four chapters: In the first chapter, I provide an analytical characterization of the effects of noisy news shocks on the transmission of fiscal policy. Using a small-scale Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with capital accumulation and endogenous labor supply, this chapter shows how aggregate noise dampens the propagation of anticipated fiscal policy over the business cycle, thus reducing the fiscal multiplier. In the second chapter, I investigate the cross-border spillovers of fiscal stimuli policies - as conducted in the aftermath of the Great Recession - using a two-country New Keynesian DSGE model. Fiscal policy is assumed to be noisy: private agents receive an idiosyncratic noisy signal about future government spending shocks. This characterization of the model allows for the dispersion of individuals' expectations and captures one of the components of fiscal policy uncertainty. This chapter also shows a method for identifying the relevance of noise within fiscal policy news, and computes the average level of noise using the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) dataset. By comparing the model simulations under the case of full information with that under noisy fiscal policy, this chapter illustrates how noise considerably weakens the international spillovers of fiscal policy. The third chapter tackles the domestic and cross-border quantitative effects of fiscal policy within a monetary union by building a two-country Heterogeneous Agents New-Keynesian (HANK) model in order to quantify the internal and external spillovers of fiscal policy on growth and inequality. Using the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) data for Germany and the rest of Euro area, the model is calibrated to match wealth and income distributions. As a policy experiment, I take the case of the fiscal devaluation, that attempts to mimic competitive exchange rate devaluation. The results suggest that specific country policy has non-negligible impact on other country wealth distribution. Inequality transmits through two channels: (i) prices, which affect the household consumption level and split between foreign and home goods and, (ii) the interest rate on bonds, whose any change affects all the members in the monetary union. Finally, this chapter sheds the light on the importance of introducing heterogeneity at the international level in understanding the complex transmission of fiscal policy. In the final chapter, I augment a dynamic labor market general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions in the public and private sectors to include components of government spending: public wage bills, public investment, and transfers. The model elucidates the interactions between public and private sectors, and have numerous policy implications. I also conduct model simulations that show how a policy mix decreasing public employment and increasing public investment can boost the private sector and increase fiscal space in the long run.

Download or read book Redistribution Inequality and Growth written by Mr.Jonathan David Ostry and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the Fund’s mandate is providing advice that will enable members’ economies to grow on a sustained basis. But the Fund has rightly been cautious about recommending the use of redistributive policies given that such policies may themselves undercut economic efficiency and the prospects for sustained growth (the so-called “leaky bucket” hypothesis written about by the famous Yale economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s). This SDN follows up the previous SDN on inequality and growth by focusing on the role of redistribution. It finds that, from the perspective of the best available macroeconomic data, there is not a lot of evidence that redistribution has in fact undercut economic growth (except in extreme cases). One should be careful not to assume therefore—as Okun and others have—that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support such a conclusion.

Download or read book The Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in Stimulating Economic Activity written by Richard Hemming and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2002-12 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The focus is on the size of fiscal multipliers, and on the possibility that multipliers can turn negative (i.e., that fiscal contractions can be expansionary). The paper concludes that fiscal multipliers are overwhelmingly positive but small. However, there is some evidence of negative fiscal multipliers.

Download or read book Designing Fiscal Redistribution The Role of Universal and Targeted Transfers written by Mr.David Coady and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2020-06-26 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a growing debate on the relative merits of universal and targeted social assistance transfers in achieving income redistribution objectives. While the benefits of targeting are clear, i.e., a larger poverty impact for a given transfer budget or lower fiscal cost for a given poverty impact, in practice targeting also comes with various costs, including incentive, administrative, social and political costs. The appropriate balance between targeted and universal transfers will therefore depend on how countries decide to trade-off these costs and benefits as well as on the potential for redistribution through taxes. This paper discusses the trade-offs that arise in different country contexts and the potential for strengthening fiscal redistribution in advanced and developing countries, including through expanding transfer coverage and progressive tax financing.

Download or read book Three Essays on Monetary Policy written by Lea Steininger and published by . This book was released on 2023* with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Englische Version: This thesis includes three chapters that inform the debate about central bank policies, especially with respect to trans-national dimensions. Thereby, the project aims at complementing the existing literature by fostering a better understanding of international monetary policy under the use of micro-economic data. The first chapter investigates how monetary policy conducted by the European Central Bank (ECB) affects the labor share at the firm-level, and suggests that the effectiveness of monetary policy may depend on the labor intensity of production. The results inform the policy debate on transmission and redistribution effects of monetary policy. The second chapter provides empirical evidence that euro-area wide monetary policy affects industrial competition in local markets. The findings suggest that tightening the policy stance is associated with a decline in competition (and vice versa), and this effect is sizeable and significant. This chapter highlights that low interest rates may support market competition and anti-monopolistic tendencies in an environment of bank-based lending. The third chapter sheds light on central bank cooperation in the shape of swap lines opened between the six major centrals banks (These are: The US Federal Reserve, ECB, Bank of England, Swiss National Bank, Bank of Canada, and the Bank of Japan.) during the Global Financial Crisis 2007/08. This facility ultimately developed into a permanent international lender of last resort facility, and acts a public liquidity backstop to Eurodollar markets. Building an interpretative framework of political economic analysis, we contrast rationalist approaches by showing that central bankers eventually institutionalize their crisis inventions. We answer the question of how the public backstop for the largest financial market - the eurodollar market - emerged in 2013.[...].

Download or read book Three Essays on International Economics written by Shu-Wing Eddery Lam and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation comprises of three essays in international macroeconomics. The first essay investigates the competition between two city states, both of which will stand in place of countries in the global scheme. Under the framework of the three-stages-game, we assume that there are two cities competing for dominance over two sectors: the manufacturing sector and the nancial sector. In addition, the government of each city state can build infrastructure to increase the competitiveness of the financial and distributive firms of its city. Under this framework, we are able to show that the amount of resources, the start-up costs of providing services, and the relative e ectiveness of their infrastructures determine the optimal amounts of infrastructures the cities decide to build, and thus also decide the equilibrium outcome of this game. In my second essay, we examine the relationship between income distribution and import patterns. The Linder hypothesis states that countries with similar economic characteristics should trade more often. However, although the total volumes of trade between these countries are similar, the traded goods may be different. This paper investigates the trading patterns of countries with similar characteristics. Specifically, we analyze the relationship between the import patterns and income distributions of importers. We develop an import similarity index to portray the composition of imports and utilize the idea of a "market overlap," a theoretical concept proposed by Bohman and Nilsson (2007), to represent the similarity of income distributions across different importing countries. We provide empirical evidence to support the notion that countries with similar income distributions display similar import patterns. We also separate countries by income level and find that income distribution exerts a positive impact on the similarity of import patterns for all but low income countries. Finally, we incorporate the characteristics of goods into our analysis and show that the positive relationship between income distributions and import patterns holds for differentiated and reference-priced goods, but not for homogeneous goods. In my final essay, we look into another aspect of international literature: the exchange rate. In the literature, we find that vector autoregressive (VAR) models and impulse response analyses are common tools to study the relationship between monetary policy and exchange rate movements. Therefore, it is important to investigate the accuracy of the VAR model. In the first part of this essay, we assume that the true, underlying, data-generating process is hump-shaped, which is the shape of the impulse response of exchange rate to a monetary policy shock. We show that results estimated from any VAR models applying AIC as their lags selection are biased. We also introduce two possible solutions to remedy this bias: the use of more lags in the VAR models or the use of the proposed loss functions estimations. These results suggest we should be cautious when interpreting empirical evidences on international literature. In the second part of the same essay, we investigate another issue that is closely related to the exchange rate and the VAR model. Under the estimation of the VAR model, the researcher implicitly assumes that the objective loss function is quadratic. However, it is a well accepted fact that monetary authority adjusts the interest rate according to policy. One of the objectives of the monetary authority is to influence the exchange rate in their favor. They estimate the size of the loss caused by deviations from the current exchange rate to the rate they desire, and then they adjust the amount of money in the international market. We propose an asymmetric loss function that monetary authorities may use to estimate the impulse response of the exchange rate to a contractionary monetary policy shock. We then compare these estimated impulse response functions to those estimated by the VAR. We find that while both of these estimated impulse response functions share the same sign, the magnitude and the duration of the shock are quite different. These results suggest that the VAR model may not be appropriate in estimating the exchange rate movement.