• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.65-101
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• 2014

This paper estimates and characterizes expected inflations using an affine term structure model based on the empirical stochastic process of the interest rates in Korea. The empirical results show that the expected inflation which marked above 4% before the global financial crisis has dampened and stabilized after the crisis. Moreover, we investigate the rationality of the various expected inflation measures in terms of the unbiasedness and efficiency and find that unbiasedness is not rejected across the all measures, while the efficiency cannot be empirically warranted. Besides, we run Granger causality tests and conclude that the expected inflations compiled from the Consensus, BOK-Expert have the cross-causality with the long-run actual inflation, while the expected inflation estimated from the term structure model has the cross-causality with the short-run actual inflation. These results connote that expected inflations collected from different sources and methods have their targets and horizons and the central bank needs to watch all of them with a balanced view instead of preferring one to the other.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.413-429
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• 2023

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of consumers' inflation expectations using consumers' inflation perceptions and the sub-components of consumer price index (CPI) basket in South Korea based on a consumer survey conducted by the Bank of Korea (BOK). Design/methodology/approach - Using Carroll's (2003) epidemiological model, we analyzed data from January 2013 to January 2023, resulting in a data set of 121 observations for both inflation perceptions and inflation expectations. This study focuses only on aggregate inflation expectations and perceptions because of data availability from the BOK. Findings - Professionals' forecasts play a major role in forming consumers' inflation expectations, whereas the actual headline CPI and consumers' inflation perceptions do not. These results remain robust when including the sub-components of the CPI basket in the analysis. Research implications or Originality - It would be the most efficient way to suppress professionals' expected inflation in fighting against a substantial spike in consumers' inflation expectations. To guide consumers' inflation expectations based on BOK's inflation targeting, the bank needs to consider professionals' forecasts in devising monetary policies.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.1-32
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• 2010

The global financial crisis has exerted enormous impacts on the attainment of inflation target in Korea. The annual average CPI inflation was 3.3% during the targeting period of 2007-2009 and the target was $3.0{\pm}0.5%$. Thus Korea has succeeded in keeping annual average CPI inflation just below the upper limit of the 2007-2009 target under the global crisis. This paper intends to evaluate the performance of the inflation targeting system in Korea. First, it estimates the conventional call rate reaction equation under the global crisis and finds that the policy interest rates never reacted to expected inflation, output gap, and won/dollar exchange rate, as expected by theory. Second, it identifies the shock of global financial crisis into core and non-core, applying the structural VAR model. The core shock was defined to have no (medium- to) long-run impact on real output. The core shock was identified to have the character of the demand shock, since it has the positive impact on the inflation and output in the short run. The structural core inflation due to core shock was an attractor of headline inflation, not vice versa. Therefore, the structural core inflation that reflects the demand-side shock would be the better intermediate target for the final headline inflation target than the official core inflation that excludes the volatile inflation of agricultural and oil-related products. During the inflation targeting period of 2007-2009, the structural core inflation was more volatile than the official core inflation, because the global crisis has very large negative impacts on the domestic demand as well as the prices of agricultural and oil-related products. This paper shows that the negative core shock during the fourth quarter of 2008 was larger than that in the financial crisis in 1998. But the core shock turned into positive very quickly in 2009, as the Korean economy recovered very quickly from crisis. The volatile changes in structural core inflation suggests that the Bank of Korea barely managed to attain the 2007-2009 inflation target, owing to the very large negative impacts of the global financial crisis on the domestic demand. It also suggests that the rapid rise in core inflation with the rapid recovery of the Korean economy will lead to rapid rise in headline inflation.

• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.417-440
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• 2020

The coronavirus pandemic of 2019-20 confronted fiscally dominant regimes around the world with the question of whether the large deficits caused by the health crisis should be monetized or financed by issuing debt. The unpleasant monetarist arithmetic of Sargent and Wallace (1981) states that in a fiscally dominant regime tighter money now can cause higher inflation in the future. In spite of the qualifier 'unpleasant,' this result is positive in nature, and, therefore, void of normative content. I analyze conditions under which it is optimal in a welfare sense for the central bank to delay inflation by issuing debt to finance part of the fiscal deficit. The analysis is conducted in the context of a model in which the aforementioned monetarist arithmetic holds, in the sense that if the government finds it optimal to delay inflation, it does so knowing that it would result in higher inflation in the future. The central result of the paper is that delaying inflation is optimal when the fiscal deficit is expected to decline over time.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.167-181
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• 2013

We investigate the dynamic asset allocation problem under inflation risk when the wealth of an investor is constrained with minimum requirements. To capture the investor's risk preference, the CRRA utility function is considered and he maximizes his expected utility at predetermined date of the refund by participation in the financial market. The financial market is supposed to consist of three kinds of financial instruments which are a risk free asset, a risky asset, and an index bond. The role of an index bond is managing inflation risk represented by price process. The optimal wealth and the optimal asset allocation are derived explicitly by using the method to get the European call option pricing formula. From the numerical results, it is confirmed that the investments on index bond is high when the investor's wealth level is low. However, as his wealth increases, the investments on index bond decreases and he invests on risky asset more. Furthermore, the minimum wealth constraint induces lower investment on risky asset but the effect of the constraints is reduced as the wealth level increases.

• Economic Analysis
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.1-42
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• 2021

The outlook for Korea's consumer price inflation rate has a profound impact not only on the Bank of Korea's operation of the inflation target system but also on the overall economy, including the bond market and private consumption and investment. This study presents the prediction results of consumer price inflation in Korea for the next three years. To this end, first, model selection is performed based on the out-of-sample predictive power of autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) models, AR models, small-scale vector autoregressive (VAR) models, and large-scale VAR models. Since there are many potential predictors of inflation, a Bayesian variable selection technique was introduced for 12 macro variables, and a precise tuning process was performed to improve predictive power. In the case of the VAR model, the Minnesota prior distribution was applied to solve the dimensional curse problem. Looking at the results of long-term and short-term out-of-sample predictions for the last five years, the ADL model was generally superior to other competing models in both point and distribution prediction. As a result of forecasting through the combination of predictions from the above models, the inflation rate is expected to maintain the current level of around 2% until the second half of 2022, and is expected to drop to around 1% from the first half of 2023.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.303-313
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• 2011

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of axle weight distribution and inflation pressure of tire on the fuel economy of tractors as well as operational range of tractor engine in terms of engine speed and power when a 4WD tractor of 38.2 kW rated power at 2500 rpm is used for plowing and flooded-field rotavating in paddy fields. (1) Plowing operation required an average engine power of 9.6~13.5 kW which equals 25~35% of rated PTO power. Engine speed ranged from 1,320.4 to 1,737.4 rpm, work velocity from 3.4 to 4.8 km/h, and fuel consumption from 3.2 to 4.2 L/h, respectively. (2) Flooded-field rotavating required an average engine power of 11.5~18.5 kW which equals 30~48.4% of rated PTO power. Out of this 6.2~12.2 kW was used for PTO power. Engine speed ranged from 1,557 to 2,067 rpm, work velocity from 2.5~5.4 km/h and fuel consumption from 3.2~5.5 L/h, respectively. (3) Axle weight distribution, inflation pressure of tire and moisture content of soil did not affect significantly the specific volumetric fuel consumption but affected significantly the fuel consumption per unit area of operation. Fuel savings amounted to 65% in plowing operation and 20% in flooded-field rotavating when the axle weight distribution and inflation pressure of tire were optimally adjusted. (4) Optimal adjustment of axle weight distribution and inflation pressure of tire are expected to save fuel consumption by 10~65% per unit area of operation in plowing and 10~20% in flooded-field rotavating.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.629-636
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• 2020

This study aims to identify and analyze the factors that affect foreign exchange reserves in Indonesia. We consider the variables of external debt, exchange rate, inflation, and exports as explanatory factors referring to previous studies. We apply the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to time-series data retrieved from the Central Bank of Indonesia (BI), the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS), and International Monetary Funds (IMF) from January 2016 to December 2018. Our results show that foreign debt, exchange rates, inflation, and exports significantly affect the simultaneous fluctuation of foreign exchange reserves in Indonesia. Partially, foreign debt has a significant and positive effect on foreign exchange reserves. The exchange rate has a significant and negative effect on foreign exchange reserves in Indonesia. However, our findings explain that inflation does not significantly affect foreign exchange reserves in Indonesia, and exports have a significant and positive effect on foreign exchange reserves. This study is expected to be useful to policymakers in managing foreign exchange reserves, so the economy of Indonesia can grow sustainably. One of the exciting things in this study lies in the model that uses the Autoregressive Distributed Log, which can explain long-term relationships through adjusted coefficient and cointegration tests.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.95-120
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• 2014

This paper attempts to demonstrate the critical role of expectation horizons in economic agents building their expectations for the future. It starts with the analysis of what constraints the economics-based assumption related to information efficiency could impose in the stochastic process, and then suggests a new concept, random revision of expectation, to refer to the case when the adjustment process of expected variables employs newly generated information only. According to the inflation dynamics formula drawn under this condition, the demand pressure measured by output gap is found to cause different impacts on inflation according to different expectation horizons. The empirical analysis of this model using the data on Korea reveals that a short expectation horizon causes coefficient estimates to become small and statistically less significant.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.3-19
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• 1991

This paper attempts to identify key determinants of long run movements of real M2 by using the Johansen procedure for estimating and testing cointegration relations. It turns out that the real M2 equation has been stable over the long run despite rapid changes in financial structure since 1975. Moreover, the real M2 equation can be reduced to a velocity equation with the opportunity cost variable, expected inflation less the weighted average rate paid on M2 deposits, being the key determinant. However, it does not work to use a market interest rate such as the yield on corporate bonds in place of expected inflation for calculation of the opportunity cost. In the U.S., a market interest rate can be used, but not in Korea. Presumably, two somewhat different reasonings can be used to explain this result. One is that the yield on corporate bonds may not adequately reflect the inflationary expectations due to regulations on movements in interest rates. The other is that M2 deposits are not readily substitutable with such assets as corporate bonds because of market segmentations, regulations, and so on. From the policymaker's point of view, this implies that the inflation rate is an important indicator of a policy response. On the other hand, policymakers do not regard movements of the yield on corporate bonds as an important policy indicator. Altogether, the role of interest rates has been quite limited in Korea because of incomplete interest rate liberalization, an underdeveloped financial system, implementation procedures of policy measures, and so on. The result that M2 velocity has a positive cointegration relation with expected inflation minus the average rate on M2 implies that frequent adjustments of the regulated rates on M2 will be necessary as market conditions change. As the expected inflation gets higher, M2 velocity will eventually increase, given that the rates on M2 do not change. This will cause higher inflation. If interest rates are liberalized, then increases in market interest rates will result in lagged increases in deposits rates on M2. However, in Korea a substantial portion of deposit rates are regulated and will not change without the authority's initiatives. A tight monetary policy will cause increases in a few market interest rates. But the market mechanism, upward pressure for interest rate adjustments, never reaches regulated deposit rates. Hence the overall effects of tight monetary policy diminish considerably, only causing distortions in the flow of funds. Therefore, frequent adjustments of deposit rates are necessary as market conditions such as inflationary expectations change. Then it becomes important for the policymaker to actively engage in adjusting regulated deposit rates, because the financial sector in Korea is not fully developed.