محمدعلی احسانی

Controlling the business cycle and minimizing the inflation gap are considered as two major goals for monetary policy. Hence, the policymaker will be able to make more decisive decisions with an awareness of the dynamic relationship and causal relationship between these two variables. Accordingly, the present study uses a discrete and continuous wavelet transform to provide a new understanding of the relationship between these two variables in Iran's economy during the years 1990:2 – 2017:1. According to the results of the research, in the short-run (less than one year), the causal relationship has been bidirectional and procyclical. In the medium run (1 to 4 years), the causal relationship is countercyclical and from the inflation gap to the business cycle. In the long run (4 to 8 years), the business cycle is leading, and the two variables are in phase. Besides, the relationship between variables is highly unstable over time and depends on different scales. Therefore, inflation in Iran's economy is not merely a monetary phenomenon, and in the medium-term is affected by changes in the real sector. According to the results of the research, for the output and the inflation to be stable, it is recommended that the policymaker take both goals simultaneously.

This study aims to evaluate the effect of sentiments on Iran's economy through a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model in a closed economy. In this study, the coefficients of the proposed model are calibrated and estimated using the quarterly data of Iran's economy from 2004 to 2015. It shows that in the presence of sentiment, how stochastic impulses affect the main macroeconomic variables. Also, for more adaptation of the model to the real world, and considering the importance and role of stickiness the effect of nominal variables on production (price stickiness) is introduced to the model. In this model, the response of macroeconomic variables to exogenous shocks of idiosyncratic demand, idiosyncratic noise, monetary policy, oil revenues, government expenditures, target inflation, and technology has been evaluated. The results obtained from the review of the impulse response functions indicate that with the occurrence of idiosyncratic demand shocks and idiosyncratic noise shocks, fluctuations in the level of macro variables do not differ in terms of the sign of the initial effect. Idiosyncratic demand and noise shocks impact on output, investment, employment, and consumption has a primary positive effect; it just has negative effects on inflation; they are different in the amount of variations; so that in the case of idiosyncratic noise shock, the initial change after the shock is much higher.

This paper aims to optimize the Central Bank transparency level which corresponds to the minimum of output volatility in 28 states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (due to the maximum data availability) during the period 2003-2014. For this purpose, the Dincer-Eichengreen index is used, which includes five aspects covering political, economic, procedural, policy, and operational transparency. The index ranges in numerical value from 0 to 15 with 0 being the most opaque and 15 the most transparent. Applying the Arellano-Bond GMM estimation and using the Dincer-Eichengreen index as a proxy of transparency, the result indicates that an increase in the level of central bank transparency will decrease output volatility up to a certain point, after which additional information from central banks begin to exacerbate it. In addition, the effects of other variables (financial depth, first lag of inflation, oil rents-GDP ratio) on output volatility are positive. Therefore, moving with caution towards monetary policy transparency is recommended as output volatility is reduced considerably, implying significant benefits for output stability.