Is monetary policy responsive to external reserves? empirical evidence from Nigeria .

Abstract

The study applied an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to an extended version of the Taylor-type rule to estimate the monetary policy reaction function for Nigeria, with emphasis on external reserves. The results show that the Central Bank of Nigeria reacts to changes in the level of external reserves and exchange rate, in addition to output gap, thereby rendering the cogent conventional Taylor rule inadequate to assess the monetary policy reaction function of the Central Bank of Nigeria. This justifies the modification of the rule to incorporate other variables in addition to inflation and output to capture the reaction of monetary policy to developments in the economy. The study also validates the interest rate smoothing behavior, showing that the Central Bank of Nigeria is concerned with costs associated with interest rate variability.