Money Shocks in a Small Open Economy with Dollarization, Factor Price Rigidities, and Nontradeables

The impact of an unanticipated monetary shock in a small open economy with dollarization, factor price rigidities, and nontradeables is re-examined in an optimizing intertemporal general equilibrium model. The framework of an earlier study is extended to incorporate foreign real money balances into the repre-sentative agent's utility function and to account for the phenomenon of dollarization so characteristic of transition economies. The major finding is that in the event of small monetary shocks, the presence of dollarization does not alter the outcome that relates the sign of response of consumption, current account balance, and other macroeconomic variables to the difference between intertemporal and intratemporal elasticities of substitutions of the total consumption index. The solution also shows that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution of money services and the share of traded goods in total consumption - a proxy for openness of the economy - are the crucial parameters in determining the response and the possibility of overshooting of the model variables, with economic openness playing a stabilizing role for the econ-omy in the event of monetary shocks.