Monetary policy, banking and heterogeneous agents

The influence of heterogeneous expectations on monetary policy performance has gained a lot of attention in the recent years. It proved to be an important factor that, under some circumstances, may even destabilize the economy (Massaro, 2012). This paper investigates the phenomenon of heterogeneous expectations further, analyzing its role in the monetary policy conduct with an active banking sector. In our analysis we assume a constant fraction of boundedly rational agents who use simple heuristics to form their expectations. The impact of those biased beliefs is studied in the framework, originally developed by Goodfriend and McCallum (2007). We first show that the presence of the banking sector changes the determinacy structure of the system and, depending on the heuristics used, the presence of the boundedly rational agents might have either stabilizing or destabilizing effect. In particular, when boundedly rational agents extrapolate the past performance in forming their expectations, the range of the stable (determinate) monetary policy instruments is narrowed.