Foreign monetary policy and domestic inflation in emerging markets

We set up a New Keynesian model for a small open economy with dominant currency pricing, to study the response of domestic inflation to an increase in the US interest rate. We show that the sign of the inflation response crucially depends on the monetary policy regime: after a US monetary tightening, inflation decreases in countries with an exchange rate peg; it increases in countries with a flexible exchange rate, unless the country follows a strict inflation targeting: in this latter case, inflation barely moves. These results are consistent with empirical evidence in a sample of emerging economies, using local projection methods.