投资的结构性变化与货币政策威力的减弱

Justin Bloesch|Jacob P. Weber Structural Changes in Investment andthe Waning Power of Monetary PolicyJustin BloeschandJacob P. Weber Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no.1190March2026https://doi.org/10.59576/sr.1190 Abstract We argue that secular change in both the production and composition of investmentgoods has weakenedinvestment’s role in the transmission of monetary policy to laborearnings and consumption. We showanalytically that fluctuations in the production ofinvestment goods amplify the response of consumptionto monetary policy shocks byvarying labor income for hand-to-mouth agents. We document three secularchangesweakening this channel: (i) labor’s share of value added in investment goods productionhasdeclined, (ii) the import share of investment goods has risen, and (iii) thecomposition of investment hasshifted towards components that are less responsive tomonetary policy. A small open economy, twoagent New Keynesian model calibratedto match these facts implies a 23percentweaker response of laborincome and a 17percentweakerresponse of consumption to real interest rate shocks in a 2020s economyrelative to a1960s economy. JEL classification:E21, E22, E32, E52, F41Keywords:monetary policy, investment, labor income, marginal propensity to consume This paper presents preliminary findings and is being distributed to economists and other interestedreaders solely to stimulate discussion and elicit comments. The views expressed in this paper are those ofthe author(s) and do not necessarily reflect theposition of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or theFederal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author(s). 1Introduction Growing evidence suggests that monetary policy shocks have smaller effects on economicactivity now than in the past, even putting aside issues of an effective lower bound oninterest rates. Multiple authors, using various empirical techniques, report declining respon-siveness of real output and inflation (Boivin, Kiley and Mishkin, 2010), consumer durables(Van Zandweghe and Braxton, 2013), employment (Willis and Cao, 2015), and investment(Baldi and Lange, 2019) to U.S. monetary policy shocks.1 This paper proposes a partial explanation: secular change in both the production andcomposition of investment goods has weakened private investment’s role in the transmissionof monetary policy to labor earnings and consumption.The importance of investment indriving consumption fluctuations in heterogeneous agent models where some householdshave high marginal propensities to consume (MPC’s) out of labor income has recently beendemonstrated quantitatively by Auclert, Rognlie and Straub (2022) and analytically byBilbiie, K¨anzig and Surico (2022).In such models, investment amplifies fluctuations inconsumption by generating labor income for high-MPC households. The high volatility ofinvestment in U.S. data means that investment fluctuations play an outsized role in drivingconsumption fluctuations in such calibrated models. We revisit this mechanism in a parsimonious, two-agent framework that links the con-sumption of hand-to-mouth agents to investment. We depart from the analyses of the pre-vious authors by studying an open economy environment, revealing an important role forimports. We show that the response of consumption by hand-to-mouth agents to changes inthe real interest rate depends on both (i) the responsiveness of investment and (ii) the ex-tent to which investment generates labor income domestically. We label this second term thedomestic labor content, which we measure from publicly available data. We then show howsecular changes have lead to declines in the domestic labor content particularly for equipmentand durable goods, while at the same time the composition of investment has shifted awayfrom components of investment that are responsive to monetary policy shocks (equipment,durable goods, and structures) and towards components that are less sensitive to monetary policy shocks (intellectual property products, such as R&D and software). Viewed throughthe lens of our calibrated model, these shifts imply large declines for the transmission ofchanges in real interest rates to labor income and consumption. We begin by reviewing changes in the composition of investment and consumer durablessince 1947. The most notable change is the rise in “Intellectual Property Products” (IPP)which has grown from less than 1% of GDP around 1950 to over 5.5% of GDP by the begin-ning of 2024, now accounting for more than a fifth of nominal spending on investment anddurables. At the same time, investment in tangible goods such as equipment, durable goods,and structures, fell as a share of GDP. Estimating empirical impulse response functions foreach component of investment and durables, we find that IPP is an order of magnitude lessresponsive to monetary policy shocks than the other components of investment, consistentwith firm-level evidence that suggest