
Working Paper 34626http://www.nber.org/papers/w34626 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH1050 Massachusetts Avenue We thank Yandong Jia (PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University) for his help and guidance inconstructing the monetary policy indicator for the PBC. We are grateful to David Aikman(discussant),Saleem Bahaj,Hunter Clark,Wenxin Du,Urban Jermann,Zhengyang Jiang(discussant), WenzheLi, Han Qiu, Silvana Tenreyro, Ricardo Reis, Philip Wooldridge, Tao Zhaand Donghai Zhang (discussant)for helpful discussions and suggestions, to Yi Huang for his helpthroughout the project, and to seminarsand conference participants at Banca d’Italia, Georgetown,UT Austin, the Pierre Werner Annual Conferenceat EUI, Kiel-CEPR Conference 2025, NBERMonetary Policy in Emerging Markets 2025, KonstanzSeminar 2025 and the NBER SummerInstitute 2025 (ME) for comments. Ramya Nallamotu and JimmyShek provided excellent researchassistance. The views expressed are those of the authors and do notrepresent those of the Bank for NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not beenpeer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies © 2026 by Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Tsvetelina Nenova, and Hélène Rey. All rights reserved.Shortsections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission The Ins & Outs of Chinese Monetary Policy TransmissionSilvia Miranda-Agrippino, Tsvetelina Nenova, and Hélène ReyNBER Working Paper No. 34626 ABSTRACT Using a novel indicator for the People's Bank of China monetary policy stance, we estimate a policyrule that accounts for the dual nature of its price stability mandate---encompassing domesticinflationand the exchange rate---and for the evolution of its operational framework. The "Ins": Thedomestictransmission follows textbook patterns, with exceptions due to the active management ofthe renminbiand the financial account. The "Outs": International spillovers are powerful and Hélène ReyLondon Business Schooland CEPRand also NBER Silvia Miranda-AgrippinoUniversity of OxfordDepartment of Economics Tsvetelina NenovaBank for International Settlements 1Introduction One of the most consequential phenomena of the past few decades has been the remarkableascent of China as a global economic powerhouse, making it one of the largest economies in the world.1 A striking way to visualise the associated transformation of the global economic landscape is to trace China’s positioning within the network of internationaltrade—from a small, peripheral player to a dominant, central actor in the span of just two decades (Figure 1).2Much has been written to analyse the features of this unprecedented Monetary policy is no exception. The gradual yet fundamental institutional changesinitiated with the country’s “opening-up” reforms have led to a dramatic evolution ofthe Chinese economic paradigm, with the progressive liberalisation of Chinese financial Our paper is a first attempt at providing a comprehensive analysis of the monetarypolicy of the PBC, and at characterising and quantifying its transmission both domesti- Two main developments are key to our effort. First, we use a novel composite mone-tary policy indicator to gauge the PBC monetary policy stance against the backdrop ofa continuously evolving operating framework that went from being essentially quantity- mandate of facilitating the Chinese government achieving its growth objectives, whilemaintaining price stability. Importantly, the rule explicitly accounts for the dual nature of The composite monetary policy indicator (CMPI) builds on the work of Xu and Jia (2019). It summarises information from a variety of both price- and quantity-based policytools that influence monetary and credit aggregates as well as interest rate targets, toreflect the transformation that the PBC operating framework underwent over the past Our specification of the policy rule for the PBC builds on the seminal work of Chen,Ren and Zha (2018)—CRZ henceforth. CRZ propose a policy rule with the following twokey characteristics. First, it is specified against the official Chinese government’s targetsfor growth and inflation that are announced at the beginning of every year during the plenary assembly of the National People’s Congress. Second, it features an endogenouslyswitching response of monetary policy to growth depending on whether output overshootsor undershoots the government’s annual target. Relative to CRZ, we introduce two main course of the last few decades.Moreover, it alleviates concerns related to conflatingthe effects of both monetary and fiscal policy due to the tight link that exists between We use the policy rule’s residuals to identify Chinese monetary policy shocks and tostudy their domestic (theIns) and international (theOuts) transmission. TheIns The identified monetary policy shock leads to an increase in Chinese interestrates, with those at shortest