Better Risk Sharing Through Monetary Policy? : The Financial Stability Case for a Nominal GDP Target

A series of papers have shown that a monetary regime targeting nominal GDP (NGDP) can reproduce the distribution of risk that would exist if there were widespread use of state-contingent debt securities (Koenig, 2013; Sheedy, 2014; Azariadis et al., 2016, Bullard and DiCecia, 2018). This paper empirically evaluates this view by exploiting an implication of the theory: those countries whose NGDP stayed closest to its expected pre-crisis growth path during the crisis should have experienced the least financial instability. This paper constructs an NGDP gap measure for 21 advanced economies that is used to test this implication. The results strongly suggest that there is a meaningful role for NGDP in promoting financial and economic stability