Fiscal Determinants of Central Bank Credibility: Evidence on Inflation- Targeting Economies

This paper studies the main fiscal determinants of central bank credibility (CBC) from 1990 to 2014. Covering 25 inflation-targeting (IT) economies, we mainly focus on sovereign debt holders and fiscal rules since adopting the IT framework. As the CBC indicator is highly concentrated in the right tail of the distribution, the mean-based approaches are incapable of unearthing the fact that the effect of fiscal factors may be asymmetric across the distribution of the credibility index. In departing from the problem, we use a quantile regression method to estimate parameters over the entire conditional distribution of CBC. The asymmetric response using the quantile regression is state-dependent and conditional on the credibility distribution. Having provided a comprehensive survey on the fiscal factors potentially related to the credibility in the literature, we find that fiscal rules are almost prominent at the lower quantiles while debt holders' composition is strongly significant at the upper tails of CBC distribution. These findings are further supported by the slope equality tests, discussed in Koenker & Bassett (1982). These results could be attributed to the more sensitivity of the private sector expectations to the debt holders’ composition. Therefore, central bankers could reduce public expectations by taking into account the non-linear impact of fiscal factors on their credibility.