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Germany’s economy is so bad even sausage factories are closingIWHThe Economist, January 15, 2026
This study investigates whether and how financial technologies (FinTech) influence the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission. We use an interacted panel vector autoregression model to explore how the effects of monetary policy shocks change with regional-level FinTech adoption. Results indicate that FinTech adoption generally mitigates the transmission of monetary policy to real GDP, consumer prices, bank loans, and housing prices, with the most significant impact observed in the weakened transmission to bank loan growth. The relaxed financial constraints, regulatory arbitrage, and intensified competition are the possible mechanisms underlying the mitigated transmission.
We investigate U.S. monetary and fiscal policy interactions in a regime-switching model of monetary and fiscal policy rules where policy mixes are determined by a latent bivariate autoregressive process consisting of monetary and fiscal policy regime factors, each determining a respective policy regime. Both policy regime factors receive feedback from past policy disturbances, and interact contemporaneously and dynamically to determine policy regimes. We find strong feedback and dynamic interaction between monetary and fiscal authorities. The most salient features of these interactions are that past monetary policy disturbance strongly influences both monetary and fiscal policy regimes, and that monetary authority responds to past fiscal policy regime. We also find substantial evidence that the U.S. monetary and fiscal authorities have been interacting: central bank responds less aggressively to inflation when fiscal authority puts less attention on debt stabilisation, and vice versa.
Exploiting the heteroscedasticity of the changes in short-term and long-term interest rates and exchange rates around the FOMC announcement, we identify three structural monetary policy shocks. We eliminate the predictable part of the shocks and study their effects on financial variables and macro variables. The first shock resembles a conventional monetary policy shock, and the second resembles an unconventional monetary shock. The third shock leads to an increase in interest rates, stock prices, industrial production, consumer prices, and commodity prices. At the same time, the excess bond premium and uncertainty decrease, and the U.S. dollar depreciates. Therefore, this third shock combines all the characteristics of a central bank information shock.
We investigate U.S. monetary and fiscal policy regime interactions in a model, where regimes are determined by latent autoregressive policy factors with endogenous feedback. Policy regimes interact strongly: Shocks that switch one policy from active to passive tend to induce the other policy to switch from passive to active, consistently with existence of a unique equilibrium, though both policies are active and government debt grows rapidly in some periods. We observe relatively strong interactions between monetary and fiscal policy regimes after the recent financial crisis. Finally, latent policy regime factors exhibit patterns of correlation with macroeconomic time series, suggesting that policy regime change is endogenous.
