Author : Yongseung Jung (KyungHee Univ.), SungJu Song (Bank of Korea)

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  This paper examines monetary policy quantitatively in a two-agent and small-scale New-Keynesian economy with debt-constrained households that cannot smooth their consumption intertemporally and frictionlessly since highly indebted households are not allowed to borrow above a certain debt ceiling in incomplete financial markets without additional risk premiums due to information asymmetry between savers and borrowers.
  We find that, in the event of cost shocks, the asymmetric responses of borrowing households without, and saving households with, dividend incomes lead to different labor supplies and consumptions over heterogeneous households, and eventually to an extension of the monetary policy transmission channels. The income effect and low elasticity of the labor supply play key roles in such asymmetric responses over heterogeneous households. We also find that the social welfare in a flexible inflation targeting (FIT) monetary policy, in which both the inflation gap and the output gap are considered in an integrated manner when policy-making, is similar to that of the Ramsey optimal monetary policy (ROP), in which the shares of debt-constrained households, as well as all economic states, including both the inflation gap and output gap, are considered comprehensively for policy-making, and that it is greater than that of simple inflation targeting (SIT) monetary policy, in which only the inflation gap is considered mechanically for policy-making. Such social welfare implies that a FIT policy may still work even in an economy with a sizable number of debt-constrained households. Further, the responses of cost shocks to consumption and labor supply are dying out more slowly under FIT and ROP policies than under an SIT policy.