Effectiveness of monetary policies : A study of the Swedish repo rate between 1994 and 2019

The repo rate, which is the key interest rate, set by the central banks has been declining for many years and hitting zero in Sweden in late 2014. We analyse the effectiveness on the economy from a change in the repo rate, comparing two time periods with high and low repo rate environments. We use quarterly data on GDP and its components, between 1994 and 2019. For analysing the effectiveness, we use multiple Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) modelling to compute a total of 12 models. In our findings, we saw that the effectiveness of a change in repo rate has been increased in the low repo rate environment, making it harder to increase the rate without harming the economy but also increasing the effect of a decrease in the repo rate. Also, we found that the investment component of GDP may exhibit extra high effectiveness in the low repo rate environment. This method of analysing the repo rates impact on the economy could be used for decision makers regarding monetary policies