Joan Christine S

Successive supply shocks led to above-target inflation for the Philippines from 2021 to 2023. Formulating the optimal policy response to bring inflation back to target requires central banks to have estimates of the direct and indirect pass-through of supply shocks to domestic inflation.

Disentangling the supply and demand factors of inflation is a complex yet crucial endeavor for effective monetary policymaking. A significant challenge arises from the fact that key elements of inflation dynamics, such as the output gap and inflation expectations, are often unobserved. This study implements a Hemisphere Neural Network whose peculiar architecture allows the estimation of the unobserved states within an augmented New Keynesian Phillips Curve.

In 2013, the Philippines liberalized its rural banking industry through a law that allowed non-Filipino citizens to own, acquire, or purchase up to 60 percent of a rural bank’s voting stocks. This study provides an initial assessment of the impact of foreign equity infusion on rural banks by examining whether rural banks with foreign equity perform significantly better than purely Filipino-owned banks in terms of profitability and asset quality.