Effects of Oil Price on Monetary Policy in Major Oil-Exporting Countries

This thesis investigates impacts of oil price on monetary policy in oil-exporting countries. The second chapter reviews the forward-looking new Keynesian model, to show the need for credibility and conservativeness in order to have less inflation, which are the theoretical foundations of central bank independence (CBI). Then by defining CBI in detail and reviewing indices for CBI, the thesis looks at the empirical works undertaken in countries to see whether or not theory is supported in the real world. In the third chapter, the thesis applies central bank independence index to assess empirically the impact of an oil price shock on monetary policy in oil-exporting countries. Two legal central bank independence indices are chosen and calculated for the top nine oil-exporting countries. Using a panel data set and a fixed effects model, it is shown that a monetary authority with higher central bank independence implements a more contractionary (or less expansionary) monetary policy after an increase in oil price compared to another central bank which is more dependent. Chapter four considers linearity and specification tests along with estimating in vector smooth transition regression (VSTR) models and tries to improve them. In the empirical section, a VAR model with time varying coefficients are proposed to analyse the relationship between inflation and monetary policy in Iran as an oil-based economy. The form of coefficients is a logistic smooth transition function and oil price is used as the transition variable. This VSTR model has two different regimes based on high and low oil price and they have different dynamic properties. The model supports the asymmetric effects of real money and oil price on inflation and shows that the central bank cares more about inflation in the regime with high levels of oil price. This chapter also shows that forecasting of inflation with the VSTR is superior to forecasting using the linear VAR.